


How to Heal a Severed Soul

by TempleCloud



Series: Gardas [3]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Curse Breaking, Dragons, F/M, Gods, Were-Creatures, lockdown - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:27:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 25,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27816805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TempleCloud/pseuds/TempleCloud
Summary: Gardas meets a woman who suffers from a curse that affects her and everyone around her. He is desperate to find a way to break the spell - but will his involvement just spread its effects further?
Series: Gardas [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1798888
Kudos: 1





	1. Chapter 1

Even as late as Maidensday, the village green was covered in snow, but the players went ahead with performing outdoors. The audience stood to watch, stamping their booted feet to stop them freezing, and sipping mugs of soup ladled from a steaming cauldron. It made sense, Gardas thought. After all, much of the action of _The Changeling Knight_ took place in a magical kingdom, where the wars between different goblin tribes cursed the land with a perpetual winter. And the final scene, where the two heroes were finally back home, took place at the Yule celebrations.

The two heroes were both Gardas.

When George, the village schoolmaster and leader of the Mummers, had invited Gardas to play the Changeling, who had been created by evil elves as a replica of a valiant young knight, they had hoped that Gardas’s son Paul could play the Knight. The two of them had played brothers before, in The Three Witches, where Paul was a murdered king’s missing son and Gardas was a palace servant who eventually turned out to be the prince’s older half-brother. But this year, Paul was in his final year at school and busy studying for his exams. Besides, even now that Paul was eighteen and had probably reached his full height, he was considerably shorter than Gardas, not to mention better looking. They could pass for half-brothers, but nobody could mistake them for identical twins.

So, instead, Gardas had needed to hurry on and off stage to switch between wearing a white hat as the Knight and a black hat as the Changeling (the hats were supposed to identify them to the audience, while being invisible to the other characters). He had tried to give the characters different voices, too, using his own deep, rough growl for the Changeling and making the Knight sound more like Paul. As the plot progressed, he could do more to differentiate them, as the adventures in which the two quasi-twins repeatedly tried to rescue each other from various enemies left them both marked by assorted injuries. On the rare occasions when they were actually together and talking to each other, he just had to duck behind the curtain where the cast changed their costumes, and talk to himself:

‘“Thou mightst show some respect – I am thy senior.” “Nay – thou thyself hast said, I am thy brother. Like any kinsmen, we must plague each other.”’ The audience – or at least, anyone in the audience who had siblings, or had more than one child – roared with laughter, and then it was all over bar the curtain call, with all the characters dancing across the stage (or, in the case of each of Gardas’s characters, limping across). As the Changeling, he danced happily and demurely with the fair maiden with whom he had fallen in love, under the watchful eyes of her parents. As the Knight, he was tussled over by numerous characters who were in love with the Knight, and ultimately was left with none of them, but bowed to the audience with a flamboyant gesture. The audience laughed again. Gardas hoped this was because of his exaggerated theatricality, and not at the absurdity that anyone who looked like Gardas could have three women and an androgynous elf courting him.

In real life, he wasn’t fit to be allowed into the company of any woman, he knew that. And yet, like the Changeling in the story, he had been adopted as an adult, allowed to become part of a family who knew what he was, and loved him anyway, because even if he was a monster, he was their monster. Paul was standing in the audience with his mother Beatrice, Beatrice’s husband Auric, and five-year-old Perdita, the other adopted member of the family. 

As the rest of the audience clapped, Paul took off his gloves and held a small object in his bare hand before passing it on to Beatrice, who did the same. A faint scar on Gardas’s wrist, corresponding to his one unarmoured spot when in dragon form, tingled. His family were holding his missing scale to transmit their emotions directly to him: affection mixed with embarrassment from Paul; affection and sympathy from Beatrice (probably realising how despondent it made Gardas to play characters who found true love, when he had no chance of finding a wife in real life); respect and a tinge of surprise from Auric, who had known Gardas since he was a shy, inarticulate eleven-year-old, and always seemed slightly surprised when Gardas turned out to be good at anything); and concern and confusion from Perdita, who probably hadn’t followed much of the plot, and might be worrying in case Gardas really was hurt. Well, no, he wasn’t wounded, but he was exhausted by the emotional intensity of the play. Behind the curtain, he slipped his costume off (fortunately, it was only a jacket that went over the top of his own clothes) and put his own coat back on, and hurried out to reassure Perdita, and to claim a fried egg sandwich and a currant bun from the refreshments stand. After breakfast, he promised himself, they could go home and he could sleep for the rest of the day.

When he reached the refreshments stall, Beatrice was already there, trying to comfort an old woman with a shawl wrapped around her head. She wasn’t one of the villagers, but Gardas thought he had seen her somewhere before.

‘I even took her to the warm pools at Lindmere,’ the old woman said. ‘She seemed to be getting better when I left her, but then she ran away from the place, and came back worse than ever. She said the Grey dragon working at Lindmere wasn’t even a proper dragon, because “it” – calling a Grey “it”, not “she”, I ask you! – was breathing cissy warm healing fire, and “proper” dragons ought to breathe either hot fire that burns you to ashes, or a cold blast to freeze you to a block of ice! What the dragons in our shop made of that, I don’t like to think – I know Gules dragons don’t talk, but that doesn’t mean they don’t take in what people say. And she won’t have anything to do with healers any longer. Personally, I think it’s a curse, not an ordinary illness, but she won’t let me take her to a hex therapist. All she’ll say is that soon she’ll be better, and I won’t need to worry any more – oh, hello, Mr Scrivener!’ she broke off, catching sight of George. ‘How’s Getricstrasza getting on?’

‘Behaving beautifully, thank you, Mrs Thra,’ said George. ‘She’s a good dragon – worth every penny I paid for her. How’s young Willow?’

‘Not so young, any more,’ sighed Mrs Thra. ‘She’s not even thirty yet, but – you know that werewolf-girl in the play, who had an ageing curse on her? I’m frightened that something like that’s happened to Willow.’

If it came to that, Wendy Thra herself looked surprisingly old today. Gardas wasn’t very good at recognising faces, and he had seen her only a few times before, when he had visited the dragon hatchery in Woadhill. This was where orphaned or abandoned dragon eggs – mostly the little eggs that couldn’t contain anything larger than a Gules embryo – were kept heated until they hatched, and the hatchlings looked after and trained until they could be adopted by suitable humans, like George and his wife Meg. Paul and his friend Maz had been studying dragons, and had done voluntary work in the shop as part of their course, and Gardas had sometimes arrived (in his other shape as a spiky Black dragon the size of a horse) to pick Paul up. Then, Wendy Thra had looked like a brisk, healthy woman in perhaps her late fifties or early sixties – though, as Gardas guessed from the crest of grass-green hair sticking up from the middle of her head, she was probably a were-dragon like himself, and centuries old. At any rate, she had seemed more vigorous than her daughter, a shy, mousy young woman whose crest of ginger hair somehow managed to take on the drabness of her grey-brown smock. Gardas had never even seen Willow’s face – when he had stood by the shop doorway waiting for Paul to emerge, she had always been crouching in the shadows, stoking fires under the dragon eggs, feeding dragonets, or sweeping out pens.

Now, however, as Mrs Thra’s shawl slipped, Gardas could see that there was normal, short grey hair growing on the sides of her head, and that the roots of her green crest were the same shade of grey. Was she just a normal human, who tried to look as if she might be a were-dragon in order to encourage trade? That wasn’t the important thing. What was startling was that she now looked bent and wrinkled enough to be ninety rather than sixty.


	2. Chapter 2

Beatrice felt that it was time to intervene, before Mrs Thra said anything more in front of the entire village. ‘Have you tried talking to Xanthus about this?’ she asked. ‘Maybe you could meet with him privately, in his stable?’

‘We already have talked,’ said the chestnut-and-gold centaur. ‘In fact, Mrs Thra slept in my stable last night, after she walked over here yesterday to consult me. Wendy, you know what I’ve told you. Do you need a ride back to Woadhill, or can you manage the walk?’

Beatrice wondered what was going on. Wendy Thra looked so frail that it was hard to believe that she could walk the twelve miles to or from Woadhill even in decent weather, let alone stomping through snow. Xanthus looked repelled at the idea of having her on his back, as though he was only making the offer as a concession to her weakness. And yet Beatrice had known Xanthus for years to be a caring mind-healer and hex therapist (a specialist in removing magical curses), and someone whose hearts were certainly in the right places. She couldn’t imagine him turning a patient away because her problems were too alarming or too difficult to solve, nor because he disliked the patient. Or was it that Willow herself had some objection to Xanthus? Some dragons suffered from an irrational fear of centaurs, perhaps because centaurs resembled knights, the dragon’s ancestral enemy.

‘Or alternatively, you could come to our house and warm up by the fire, and then I could take you back on the broomstick,’ she suggested. Mrs Thra brightened at this. Xanthus frowned.

The other members of the family sensed that Beatrice wanted to talk to Mrs Thra on her own, and discreetly removed themselves as soon as they arrived home. Auric, Paul and Perdita went out to play in the snow in a nearby meadow. Gardas, however, slumped in a chair by the fire in the living-room, looking tired but too fired up by the emotions of the play to go to sleep just yet. Mrs Thra smiled nervously at him.

‘You were – very good in the play this morning,’ she said. ‘Do you like acting?’

‘Yes,’ said Gardas. ‘And role-playing games, but I prefer acting, because it’s got a script. In role-playing, I could make the wrong decision, and it could get everyone in the party killed, the same as in real life. With scripts, I know what I’ve got to say, and what’s going to happen.’

Mrs Thra nodded. ‘Do you worry about making the wrong decisions in real life?’ she asked, sounding like a mind-healer herself. Well, probably she had taken Willow to enough of them over the years that this felt like the normal shape of a conversation.

‘I’ve made a lot of bad decisions,’ said Gardas. ‘I’ve killed…’ he looked as if he was about to begin a recital of his fourteen years of crimes as attack-dragon for an evil wizard. Beatrice, out of Mrs Thra’s line of sight, gave a slight shake of her head. Mrs Thra had enough problems of her own to talk about. ‘I killed a bad wizard, and things got better after that,’ Gardas amended. ‘Things have been better, the last five years. Getting to know my son, and looking after Perdita, and coming here to live with Beatrice. It’s like having a second chance at life. I don’t want to screw this one up. I’m – happy, now.’

‘So – do you think you’re happier now, or were you happier when you were a child, like Perdita?’ Mrs Thra asked.

‘I didn’t even start to be happy, until I came here,’ said Gardas. ‘I didn’t know were-dragons were allowed to be happy. But Perdita’s never thought that she’s not supposed to be happy. It’s because she’s got a family who love her. And so have I, now. Like the Changeling in the play.’ He yawned.

‘Do you need to get some rest?’ Beatrice asked.

‘I think so. Goodbye, Mrs Thra. Goodnight.’ Gardas picked up How Not to Propose Marriage, and made his way upstairs. Probably he would read for a couple of pages, just long enough to allow the familiar words of his favourite book to lull him to sleep. Or alternatively, he would allow himself to be so absorbed in the story of the hero’s romantic misadventures and his demon’s attempts to help that he wouldn’t pay much attention to the voices downstairs.

‘What was that book?’ Mrs Thra asked.

‘It’s a story – there are five of them,’ Beatrice explained. ‘I found the first one, How to Train Your Demon, in a cave when I was fifteen, and apprenticed to the witch who lived in that cave. She didn’t know how it got there. It just appeared one summer day while she was having a rest – you know how trolls hate summer – and I was out gathering herbs. The other four seem to have turned up in strange places all over Cideria. One called How to Hunt a Shaman was found by a teacher who liked it so much that she made her pupils copy it out as handwriting practice.’ When Beatrice had first become a qualified witch, and inherited a cottage which included bizarre magical items that she didn’t intend to use, she had tracked down the original copy of How to Hunt a Shaman and the other three books, and traded crystal balls and magical jewellery for them. She wasn’t sure why, other than that she loved the stories, and that she had been very lonely at that time in her life, and the books had felt like friends. Then, later on, Gardas had moved in, and Beatrice had lent the books to him, and he had turned out to love them even more than Beatrice did. 

The books were all written in rusty-brown ink, and in much the same handwriting, though it looked more rounded – almost like a child’s handwriting – in How to Train Your Demon, and grew gradually spikier. It could be quite hard to decipher some words in the last volume, How to Steal a Wizard’s Magic, the tale of how the hero has to avenge his mentor, a once powerful wizard whose magical powers have been stolen from him by some unknown enemy.

‘Can I ask what they’re bound in?’ Mrs Thra asked.

‘You can, but I don’t know the answer,’ Beatrice admitted. ‘I know it sounds horrible to admit it, but the leather looks like,’ (she dropped her voice, just in case Gardas was still awake and listening) ‘dragon-skin. I hope that isn’t true – but even if it was, it might have been that a dragon died naturally, and wanted their skin to be used for something. I’ve never seen a dragon that shade of yellowy-orange, though.’

‘Gamboge,’ said Mrs Thra. ‘Willow used to be a Gamboge dragon.’

‘Used to be? Isn’t she now?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Mrs Thra. ‘By the way, would you happen to have any truth potion?’

‘Gardas and I made a batch last week, yes. Do you have difficulty talking about this without it?’ Xanthus used truth potions to help reticent patients talk without inhibition, but Mrs Thra seemed quite talkative already.

‘It isn’t that. It’s just that I don’t know if you could believe me, otherwise.’

Beatrice, like most witches, had a good sense of when to believe people, but she wasn’t going to refuse truth potion to someone who was worried about being believed. She made tea for the two of them, and allowed Mrs Thra to add a few drops of the potion to hers before telling any more of her story:

‘The first thing you need to know is, I’m human. So was Harry, my husband – he’s dead, now. I mean, I suppose we must’ve had were-dragon ancestors somewhere along the line, but we didn’t know anything about it until we had Willow, and she was born with those funny yellow eyes with slit pupils right across them, like a goat – not up-and-down pupils like a cat, or a fox. So we knew she’d be a were-dragon sooner or later, and we wanted to give her the best life we could, so we went and spent a few years living with some Grey dragons on the north coast – they’d been exiled from Wyrms, poor things, and they were lovely girls, and all missing their sons and husbands back on Wyrms. Anyway, they talked to Willow in Dragonese, and she started speaking that before she spoke Westron, so that helped us start to learn the language, too. She was such a lovely, happy little girl, playing with dragons – there was one dragon, Corona, who had children, Luna and Diana, who were about Willow’s age – I mean, they’d have been my age or older, but for true dragons, that’s about the same as a three-year-old human child, I suppose, and they were all such good friends.

‘Well, anyway, by the time Willow was coming up for five, Corona said it was time we moved back to a human town so that Willow could go to school with other human children. We decided to go to Woadhill, because it wasn’t just human – I mean, there are plenty of troll families living there, as well as all the troll tourists who come for the polishing salons, and quite a few kobolds, as well. I didn’t want Willow growing up in a place where everyone thought “person” means “human”.

‘And as well as that, there were the dragon hatcheries. I mean, as well as the Greys where we’d been living, there were plenty of Green dragons in the wood, and there was a breeding year just before we left, and several Greens managed to get together with a Blue or Black dragon and laid eggs, and then they kept all the big eggs that they thought might have a Green daughter or a Blue or Black son, but if it was one of those tiny eggs, not much bigger than a big turnip, that could only have a Gules dragonet inside, they just left them for the egg-collectors to find! I don’t know how they can do that – their own flesh and blood! I mean, I know Gules dragons aren’t very clever, and I suppose from a dragon’s point of view it’s like having a retarded child, whereas from a human’s point of view they’re good pets – I mean, they’re more intelligent than dogs, and more willing to bond with humans than a cat or a hawk would be. But it still seems awfully callous. I suppose it’s because they had that horrible Queen dragon on Wyrms, and she must have been making life difficult for all the dragons around, even in Cideria, so they wanted any of their children who wouldn’t be clever enough to defend themselves to be out of harm’s way, but it’s horrible, all the same, isn’t it?

‘So, we got jobs in a hatchery, and Willow was in her element there, chattering away to all the hatchlings. She started school, and she did well there, too – she was good at the lessons, and had lots of friends, humans and kobolds and trolls. She was good at magic, too, from when she was little – well, all were-dragons have magic powers – or don’t they? Does Gardas?’

‘He used to,’ said Beatrice. ‘I was at school with him and Auric, and Auric’s cousin, and he was a good wizard then. But then he and Paul lost their magic powers a few years ago, in that war in the Downs.’

‘That’s sad,’ said Mrs Thra. ‘Willow lost hers – well, I’m getting ahead of myself. She was eight, the first time she turned into a dragon – we just came down to breakfast one morning and found her flying around the garden, with all the hatchlings who were old enough to fly following her. She’d have been, oh, about the size of a sheep, I suppose. We were so proud of her, and of course we’d taken her to be blessed at the Temple of All Gods when we first moved to Woadhill, but we decided to take her again, for a blessing on her dragon aspect. She was really interested in the temple – we spent a whole day there, looking at the statues and the stained-glass windows and the tombs, and the funny clock where a clockwork dragon comes out every quarter-hour and has a fight with a clockwork knight.

‘So then, a few days later, she went off on a flight on her own, and we didn’t find her for six weeks. It turned out she’d flown to the Temple as her usual, Gamboge self, and then used her magic to make herself look smaller and redder, like the Gules dragons who live in the Temple, and she’d just been living there all this time and getting fed by the attendants.

‘Well, frankly, I was so angry I felt like smacking her. I’ve never done that – it’s not something I’d even have thought of, when she was little and we were living with the Greys, and seeing how gentle they were with their dragonets. And then, training Gules dragonets – well, if they fly off and won’t come when they’re called, or chase someone’s chickens, and then you punish them when they finally do come back, they’ll just decide not to come back next time, won’t they? We just train ours by flying them on a long leash, and holding out bits of food for them, until they’re used to coming back to their owners. It’s the only way that works – well, the only way I’d use, anyway. I’ve heard of older dragon-trainers using very cruel methods, but I couldn’t do anything like that.

‘But anyway, it seemed to me that Willow needed keeping on a leash for the time being. I gave her this great long telling-off, and said she wasn’t allowed to go out and play with her human friends, or to be a dragon anywhere in the exercise pen in the garden, for the next six weeks. She didn’t cry or complain, she just said, “Yes, Mother.” She never called Harry and me “Dad” and “Mum” ever again after that, always “Father” and “Mother”. And I told her I loved her, and held out my arms for a hug, but she just said, “Please may I go to my room, Mother?”

‘And after that, she was never the same again. She never wanted to play with the hatchlings again – she did her chores, feeding them and cleaning out their pens and so on, but then she’d just go back to her room if we didn’t want her for anything. Sometimes I used to hear her crying, but when I tried asking her what was the matter, she just said odd things like, “Be afflicted, and mourn, and weep: let your laughter be turned to mourning, and your joy to heaviness.”

‘I suppose it was about a year or so later that she flew away again, and was gone six weeks, as before. She hadn’t gone to the Temple this time – that was the first place we looked. This time Harry was muttering that he really would smack her, since grounding her obviously hadn’t been enough to make her behave herself – and besides, for the past year she’d shown no interest in going out and playing anyway, so it would hardly be a punishment.

‘But when she came in, she was moving stiffly, as if she was already in pain. She changed back into human form, and before she’d had time to put her clothes on, I could see she was covered with bruises and welts – far worse than anything we’d have dreamed of doing to her! I asked her what had happened – I mean, if she’d been in dragon form while she was away, I don’t know who could have thrashed a dragon like that! But she just said, “The blueness of a wound cleanseth away evil: so do stripes the inward parts of the belly.”

‘I asked her again who had hurt her, and she said, “I scourge my body and bring it into subjection.” And – well, I know this is awful, but I felt angry with her for that, almost more than for flying away – that she’d known we must be angry with her and might punish her, so she’d decided to punish herself first, as if she was trying to make us feel sorry for her. She even seemed to have developed a taste for beating herself – she wanted to do it every day, until we had to punish her by forbidding her to hurt herself! She was quite upset about that, said that we hated her and we didn’t want her to turn into a good girl, but she stopped hitting herself, which was the most we could hope for by then.

‘And that was how it went on for the next few years, until she was thirteen. About once a year for the next four years, she’d fly off and be gone for weeks at a time, and come back looking battered, and for the next few weeks she’d be ill and miserable and would barely eat, and then she’d rally a little, but – each time, there always seemed to be less of her left than before. She didn’t seem to have any friends at school any more, and she wasn’t doing so well in her lessons, especially magic. She was mostly obedient at home, except that nothing we did could stop her flying off when she felt like it. The fifth time it happened, when she was thirteen, she came walking home in human form – she’d lost all her magic, and that meant she couldn’t turn into a dragon any more. Is it the same with your Gardas?’

‘No – I sometimes think he’d prefer it if he couldn’t,’ Beatrice admitted. ‘In his case, it means he can’t always control when or how he turns into a dragon. If it’s been too long since he last took dragon form, or if he gets too emotional, or if one of the children is in danger, he automatically switches into dragon form, and then has no way of turning himself back. Also, at first he found it difficult to think like a rational adult and behave appropriately when he’s in dragon form, though he’s getting better at that. But he can never be normal, even by were-dragon standards, and he’s painfully aware of that.’

‘Willow hardly seems to show emotions at all, these days,’ said Mrs Thra. ‘Even when Harry died, about ten years back, she didn’t even cry. It’s as though she’s stopped noticing us as people. She does the housework, cleans the hatchery, and stays in her room if I don’t give her a task to do. She never goes out – well, she doesn’t seem to have any friends to go out with. I don’t even know what she does when she’s in her room.’ Mrs Thra fell silent.

‘So, she’s been like this ever since she was a teenager?’ Beatrice prompted, after a few minutes.

‘Well, yes, only – just recently, this past year, it’s been getting worse.’ Mrs Thra was crying by now. ‘I’ve been starting to feel old lately, but – Willow looks older than me, if you can believe that. I’m convinced there’s some sort of curse on her, but she won’t talk about it. Back in the autumn, before the snow fell, I came here to find Xanthus and ask him to come and meet her – I couldn’t get her to come here to see him. At first she didn’t want to see him when he came to Woadhill, but I told her to go out in the exercise pen in the garden with him – it’s not fair asking a centaur to be comfortable in the house, after all – and not come back in until they’d discussed matters. Well, they talked for a few minutes, and then Willow went upstairs to her room, and Xanthus said there was nothing he could do for her, and went home, and when I asked Willow how things had gone, she said I didn’t need to worry, because everything would be all right within a year. 

‘I didn’t know what either of them meant, and then the weather’s been too bad to travel for a few months, but by yesterday, I was so desperate that I had to come here and see Xanthus…’ Mrs Thra was crying so hard that she needed to wait several minutes before she could speak again. ‘He says Willow put a curse on herself, and it can’t be undone unless she repents of what she’s done, and she’s going to be dead within the year.’ Mrs Thra gave up trying to speak, and burst into sobs. Beatrice put her arms round her, and held her while she cried.

Upstairs, Gardas had been trying to sleep. But, as soon as he lay down, he felt wide awake, and keen to hear about Willow. He had just about managed to tune out the conversation when his ears, embarrassingly, had homed in on the phrase ‘felt like smacking her.’ He had managed to convince himself that no, this was just a parental way of saying, ‘I felt cross with her,’ and that most people weren’t perverts like him, when Mrs Thra had got to the description of Willow repeatedly coming home after having been beaten, or possibly after having beaten herself. After that, he felt so excited that he knew he had no chance of sleeping. It was all he could do not to turn into a dragon. He wondered whether he ought to come down and ask for a calming potion after all, but this would mean admitting that he had been awake and listening all this time.

Beatrice had explained to him that he wasn’t a bad person just because he had sexual feelings, and that this was normal and quite all right. But Gardas knew that getting an erection at the thought of someone being hurt was not at all normal, and meant that he was creepy and a monster in ways that had nothing to do with being a were-dragon, or even being a were-dragon who had lost his magic powers.

Xanthus had explained to him that it wasn’t even his fault that he felt excited by the idea of cruelty: that it was just because of the bad experiences he’d had as a child. It sounded as if Willow must have had experiences at least as bad as his, even if he wasn’t sure how that had happened, when she had good parents who loved her. Or was Mrs Thra only pretending to be a nice person? Maybe she’d taken an antidote to truth potion, so that she could trick people into believing what she said? Maybe she was the one who was tormenting Willow?

Gardas knew that he felt very sorry for Willow and intrigued by her story, and desperately wanted to help her in whatever way he could. But he also knew that he was the last person who should be allowed anywhere near her.


	3. Chapter 3

A week after Maidensday, the season had turned from winter into summer, bypassing spring altogether. Beatrice had to admit that the seasons had been very peculiar over the past year. Last year, half of summer had fallen in April and the other half in October, with winter sending icy rain and hailstorms from May to September. Then the first snow of winter had come in November, followed by the first daffodils of spring in December. Of course, it never actually snowed on Yule itself – or not the first few days of the festival – but you could usually rely on it to be cold, at any rate. This year, the winter solstice had been full of warm, gentle spring showers, and birds building nests. Beatrice could only hope that they had managed to rear their fledglings before the blizzards that had wrapped Cideria in snow a couple of days before Maidensday.

The four festivals of Yule, Maidensday, Midsummer and Harvest were intended, not just to thank the gods for all the blessings of the year, but to give the weather a hint as to what it was supposed to be doing next. The Maidensday plays were always tales of death and rebirth, to remind the frozen land to awaken to new life. Last year’s play had starred Paul as a young wizard who discovers that he has to sacrifice his life to defeat the Dark Lord, with Gardas as the Dark Lord’s apparent henchman who eventually turned out to have been helping the hero all along. (Because Paul and Gardas had lost their magical powers, and none of the other members of the cast had ever had any magic, Auric had helped out with the special effects, casting spells from behind a curtain.) The young hero played by Paul had been miraculously resurrected, while Gardas’s character had been left dead. 

It was, Beatrice thought, a mark of how much Gardas had improved that this hadn’t driven him back to mooching around the house muttering that he should have died in real life. He seemed to be recognising that God, when creating a being as long-lived as a were-dragon, might have more planned for him than simply, ‘Father a child when you’re still a schoolboy yourself, be an evil wizard’s slave for the next fourteen years, rebel against the evil wizard, die.’ Even if nobody could be sure where the rest of his life would take him, he was content to live with Beatrice and her family while he tried to work it out.

In the meantime, he was content to shovel goat-dung and weeds onto the compost heap, while Beatrice sorted through the vegetable beds to see which of the things they had planted to take advantage of the early warm weather had survived. Perdita and her friend Hazel ran around in some game that made sense only to them, occasionally pausing to help by pulling up weeds (or any herb they didn’t recognise, unless Beatrice stopped them in time).

Gardas paused from his work, took off his shirt to make the most of the warm sun, and stretched out his arms as though to embrace the whole of Cideria and tell it how much he loved it. Gardas’s face seldom showed much emotion, and neither did his voice except when he was speaking Dragonese, although the many plays he had acted in over the past five years had given him some practice in conveying his characters’ emotions. When he was offstage and being himself, he returned to his usual expressionless face and monotone voice, but in the last couple of years, he had begun to invent a sign language of gestures, based on the body movements he would naturally make in dragon form. Spreading out his arms like wings meant, ‘I am happy,’ because he was at his happiest when flying. Tossing his head and snorting like a horse meant that he was interested or excited.

It was just part of being a were-dragon, Beatrice thought – and stopped herself suddenly. No, that wasn’t an explanation, was it? Perdita was a were-dragon, but when she was in human form, she smiled or grimaced, giggled or shouted or pleaded, just like any child her age. And the other two were-dragons Beatrice knew behaved like normal humans, too – even though one of them had hatched from a dragon egg. She couldn’t go on telling herself that Gardas didn’t sound emotional when speaking Westron because Dragonese was his first language, or that his face didn’t move much because he expected to have the bony mask of a dragon. Besides, he had been just as dour and undemonstrative when they were at school, before he had ever taken dragon form.

No, she had to admit, there was a lot about him that couldn’t be explained by being a were-dragon, or even being a were-dragon who had lost his magic. There was a disease whose early symptoms often included not talking much, being unable to express emotion, showing little interest or pleasure in anything, and becoming more socially withdrawn, before the more dramatic signs of madness started to show. Beatrice knew how to brew – had taught Gardas to brew, for that matter – healing potions to keep these latter problems, like hallucinations and delusional beliefs, under control, but there was no cure that could really restore sufferers to their normal, healthy selves. Though it wasn’t as if Gardas’s life had ever been anything you could call ‘normal’, at any age.

Well, if there wasn’t any cure, did it matter if she explained Gardas’s peculiarities as, ‘He’s like this because he’s ill,’ or, ‘He’s like this because he’s Gardas,’? She could only go on doing what she would have done anyway: be a kind and supportive friend, make sure there were calming potions available when he was too agitated to sleep, remind him to consult Xanthus about his problems, and try to encourage him to develop at least some interests and friendships outside the home. He seemed to enjoy acting and role-playing games, and even if he hadn’t developed very deep friendships with the people he met through those, he got on fairly well with George and Meg – especially since they had become the adoptive parents of Paul’s friend Princess.

His closest real friends – as in people he went to visit just to enjoy their company – were dragons. A couple of years ago, he had been to visit the island of Wyrms, and since then, he had flown off for a weekend every so often to visit a dragon couple who had become friends of his, Obashu and Clover. Beatrice wasn’t sure what they did together, except that it apparently involved Gardas and Obashu fighting whenever they met, and then Clover breathing healing fire over their injuries. From what Gardas had told her, they sounded as flaky as Gardas himself, but perhaps that was why he got on well with them. And at least dragons, unlike humans, were likely to be still alive in a few hundred years’ time, when Beatrice and every other human whom Gardas knew now were dead. But would they be able to understand him and look after him? Would he have matured past the stage of needing to be looked after? How could anyone know?

A wail of protest interrupted Beatrice’s thoughts. Hazel had picked up a worm to toss to a blackbird, who was flying off with it. ‘Stop it!’ Perdita was calling. ‘Let the poor worm go!’

The blackbird was so startled that he dropped the worm into a patch of brambles. It landed on a thorny stem, and coiled tightly round the thorns. Perdita tried to coax the worm away, but in terror it clung even more tightly, impaling its soft body more deeply on the thorns. ‘Come on, Wriggly,’ said Perdita. ‘We’re going to put you back in the nice mud. You have to let go of the prickles.’

‘It won’t,’ said Gardas morosely.

‘Why won’t it?’ asked Perdita. Gardas shrugged.

‘Because it’s blind, and it can’t see what’s down there,’ Beatrice explained. ‘Worms find their way around by touching things. So at the moment, even if the prickles hurt, they’re the only thing the worm has to hold onto – the only thing it can be sure is real. It’s afraid to let go.’

‘What about the blackbird?’ protested Hazel. ‘He’s hungry and you’ve made him drop his lunch!’

‘Can you make Wriggly stop feeling frightened?’ Perdita asked.

‘I can try,’ Beatrice said, feeling embarrassed at saying anything so feeble. She could hear Nana Hithril’s retort, whenever Beatrice as an apprentice witch had said that to her: ‘No point “trying”, is there? DO it, can’t you?’ She could remember all too well her burning sense of indignation at the old kobold. She had always wanted to retort: ‘But it’s the first time you’ve asked me to do this! How can I learn to do it, if I’m not allowed to try?’ But she had felt too ashamed of herself for not being the sort of confident girl who always knew that she could get everything right the first time. So she had forced herself to pretend to be confident, and either succeeded (in which case Hithril had usually cuffed her with a sharp-clawed paw for showing off) or failed (in which case Hithril would sneer, ‘Not so clever, are you?’). It occurred to her now that, if she had actually had the confidence to argue, Hithril might have been pleased. But it was too late now to turn her thirty-five-year-old self into the sort of teenager she wished she had been.

In the meantime, she tried to project an aura of reassurance onto the worm. It allowed her to unwind it from the bramble-stem, but this probably had less to do with the animal’s feeling relaxed than with its being close to death. When she laid it on the freshly dug earth, it lay there, twitching slightly, but too weak to start burrowing.

‘It’s hurt,’ said Perdita. ‘Gardas, can you make it better?’

‘No,’ said Gardas. ‘Too far gone. Hazel’s right – let the bird have it back. He’s probably got chicks to feed.’

‘Can’t we give them something else?’ asked Perdita. ‘Apples, or bread?’

‘Not when they’re little,’ said Gardas. ‘They need worms. Like babies need milk.’

‘I’m not a baby, and I still like milk,’ said Perdita with dignity. ‘But I don’t eat meat any more, ‘cos I’m a Grey dragon and Greys don’t kill animals, ‘cos if they do they get varnished, I mean tarnished, they go dark and then they can’t fly any more.’

Hazel, a year older than Perdita, snorted at her friend’s naïvety. ‘Where d’you think milk comes from?’

‘From our goats,’ said Perdita, looking puzzled at such a pointless question.

‘Goats don’t give milk unless they have kids,’ Hazel pointed out. ‘So, what happens to the kids?’

‘We’re keeping one, because she’s a nanny,’ said Perdita. ‘But we’ve got to find homes for the billies.’

‘They get eaten,’ Hazel explained patiently. ‘They find homes in someone’s _stew_.’

‘That’s not true – is it?’ asked Perdita, looking anxiously from Beatrice to Gardas and back. ‘I know some people think trolls eat goats, but that’s not true, is it? Trolls only eat rocks.’

‘Trolls eat rocks, that’s right, but humans eat goats,’ explained Beatrice. ‘So do some dragons.’ Gardas said nothing. Perdita surely knew that, as a Black dragon, he was a carnivore when in dragon form, and saw no reason to go vegetarian when in human form. Not that the family ate much meat anyway, so Perdita’s insistence on being a vegetarian wasn’t a problem, but it could be if she started refusing to touch milk, cheese, or eggs. ‘It’s hard to live without killing something,’ she pointed out. ‘Even to grow vegetables and healing herbs, I have to kill the weeds.’

She used to slaughter her own livestock, too. Most human witches in the countryside kept farm animals, not just a familiar, and some were even invited to their neighbours’ farms to kill animals quickly and painlessly by magic. Among covens of human witches, the most common greeting in late autumn and winter was, ‘What’ve you been doing lately?’ ‘Oh, you know, busy butchering pigs. Want some brawn/headcheese/sausages?’ But Beatrice’s mentors were a kobold who preferred raw roots and leaves, and a troll who could only eat rocks, and so there wasn’t much opportunity for companionably grilling sausages over the campfire. They were due to be meeting this evening, she remembered. Nana Hildrith was going to come round to Beatrice’s cottage, and Beatrice would give her a lift over to Granny Flint’s cave, either on the broomstick or, should he be in the mood, on Gardas.

‘You kill babies, too, don’t you?’ said Hazel to Beatrice, not accusingly, but just seeking confirmation of a fact. Beatrice saw Gardas stiffen, although he turned back to shovelling from wheelbarrow to compost heap as if he wasn’t listening.

‘No she doesn’t!’ said Perdita. ‘My mum’s a good witch, not a bad witch!’ But she sounded unsure, now. If Beatrice was willing to kill goat kids, the quaver in her voice suggested, why not human kids as well?

‘What do you mean by that?’ Beatrice asked.

‘My mum was going to have a baby,’ said Hazel. ‘It was going to be a little brother or sister. I wanted it to be a sister, ‘cos I don’t like my brother. But then my mum’s tummy hurt, and her shoulder hurt, and it hurt when she went to the privy. And then she went to see you, and then she wasn’t going to have a baby after all. So, did you kill the baby?’

‘In that case, yes,’ said Beatrice. ‘It was – one of those times when Death has to take a soul, but a witch can bargain with him over which one. So if he’d taken Nell’s soul, the baby would have died as well, because he was inside Nell, but if I could persuade Death just to take the baby’s soul, Nell could get better, and that way you and Rob still have a mum, and your dad still has a wife.’

‘How do you persuade him?’ asked Hazel.

‘We have to play a game. If I win, I can choose which soul he takes.’

‘What sort of game?’ asked Perdita.

‘It can be almost anything. Except blow football. He won’t agree to that one any more.’ Beatrice couldn’t blame him – considering that he lacked either lips or breath, it wasn’t as if he stood a sporting chance.

‘What did you play?’ Hazel asked.

‘Fivedice. He isn’t good at games that depend on chance, because he’s used to certainty. He can be a hundred per cent certain that each of us is going to die, and except in cases where a magic user intervenes, he normally knows when that’s going to happen.’

Gardas turned as if he was going to ask something, but then his eye was caught by something going on in the lane behind Beatrice. She turned to look behind her, and saw a frail, cloaked figure plodding towards the cottage. Wendy Thra had looked nearer ninety than sixty, but this figure seemed older still. Even in the hot weather, she was wrapped in a thick woollen robe that covered her from head to shins. The drab, grey-brown material seemed chosen to emphasise how unimportant she was, but Beatrice could see a wisp of bright ginger hair straggling from the hood.

The figure turned towards the cottage. ‘Hello,’ she said, in a thin, withered voice. ‘Are you Mistress Spinner?’

‘I am indeed,’ said Beatrice, wiping her hands on the grass before bowing, and then holding out a hand for the figure to shake. ‘And what can I do for you?’

‘My mother came to see you, and now she’s very ill,’ said the figure. ‘I wondered whether you could undo one-sixteenth of a curse?’


	4. Chapter 4

Gardas was fairly sure Willow didn’t mean what she’d said the way it sounded. All the same, he was relieved when Hazel actually asked Beatrice, ‘Did you curse her mum?’ as it wasn’t the sort of question he could bring himself to ask. After all, witches had to make tough decisions sometimes.

‘No, no, that wasn’t what I meant!’ said Willow hastily. ‘I put a curse on myself – years ago, when I wasn’t much older than you,’ she said to Hazel. ‘I split my soul five times, which means I’ve got only a thirty-second of a life to live.’

The children looked blank at this. Gardas wondered how Willow knew she had only half a minute of life left. Most people in Cideria didn’t measure time so precisely – even the clock in the Temple of All Gods had only three dials, one divided into sixty to measure minutes, one divided into twenty-four to measure hours, and one showing the phases of the moon. It was only when brewing potions that you sometimes needed to count seconds by chanting, ‘Hippogriff one, hippogriff two, hippogriff three…’ and so on until the mixture had infused to precisely the right strength.

‘I see,’ said Beatrice. ‘And what made you decide to split it five times?’

‘I didn’t mean to – I was aiming for six!’ protested Willow. ‘That way, I’d have a sixty-fourth of a soul, and die sometime in my teens, while my parents were still young enough to bear it! But after the fifth time, I didn’t have enough magic left to work the spell again, and so I have to die in my thirties, when my father’s dead and my mother’s old and ill and needs me to nurse her. She had a bad turn three days ago – she can’t walk or talk or feed herself or anything. I’ve left her with a neighbour looking after her today, but I’m her only child, and it’s my duty to be with her until she dies – and to look after her dragons,’ she added, with a grimace. ‘And so, I wondered whether you knew a way to undo some of the curse, and give me back another thirty years? I don’t need more than that – the physician said my mother might recover some of her health and live a few more years, but I can’t see her making it to ninety.’

Gardas’s mouth felt dry. He remembered the Maidensday play last year, with the Dark Lord who had split his soul by murdering people, but that was to make himself immortal. Was it still wrong if you split your soul in order to shorten your life? And from what Mrs Thra had said, whatever soul-splitting spells Willow had carried out as a young girl had involved hurting herself rather than anyone else. So, if killing other people to extend your own life was bad, didn’t that mean that laying down your own life was good? Like Paul’s character giving his life to defeat the Dark Lord, or Gardas this year as the Knight who got killed rescuing his Changeling double, and then was raised to life. 

He wanted to admire Willow for doing such a noble, godlike thing. But instead, part of him wanted to heal her and protect her and love her back to health and lick her until she smiled and tickle her until she laughed and… well, never mind that, because the other part of him, Shadow, who was the dragon side of his personality, said in his mind, _She’s creepy! And she doesn’t even like dragons! Why does she hate dragons, when she IS part dragon?_

‘I think we need to talk about this in private,’ said Beatrice. ‘Gardas, if I bring our guest here into the house, can you do the rest of the weeding and keep an eye on the children? And you, Auric,’ she added, seeing that Auric had come out of the house to see what was going on and who the visitor was.

But at this point, Nana Hildrith arrived. She was a very elderly kobold, so old that most of her fur had fallen out, except for that which grew out of her ears, and the long white whiskers bristling from either side of her nose and above her eyes. Being bald may have been why she was the only kobold Gardas knew who habitually wore clothes. Most of them didn’t mind dressing up in green coats and red pointy caps at Yule, though the real traditionalists like Tallis preferred to wear nothing but their fur even then. But Nana Hildrith wore a black robe and a black pointy hat, like an old-fashioned human witch. The robe had been a human’s shirt originally, and it came down to the little kobold’s hind paws and almost hid her tail. She had to roll the sleeves up for her front paws to stick out. The hat had probably started out as a normal Yule cap, perhaps even with a jolly pompom on the end, but Hildrith had dyed it and the shirt with iris roots, and reinforced the droopy tip of the hat with twigs so that it stood up straight on her head instead of dangling down her back. It made her about half as tall again as she was without the hat. There was certainly no pompom on it now. This was a hat that said: underestimate me, and it’ll be the last thing you do.

When she saw Willow, however, her robe bulged out from her body as if her few remaining patches fur were standing on end. ‘Bothering humans, now, are you?’ she spat at Willow. ‘Get any wise words from Xanthus, did you?’

‘He – he said it was too late,’ said Willow miserably. ‘When he came to see me in the autumn, I wouldn’t speak to him, because – well, my mother was all right then, and I didn’t want to be healed just for myself. So when I came to him today, to ask him to take off just a little of the curse, he locked himself in his stable and shouted at me to go away. He said I’d made my choice.’

‘Wise words, those,’ said Hildrith. ‘Made your choice twenty years ago, I reckon.’

‘But it’s NOW that my mother is ill!’ exploded Willow. ‘She isn’t dying – she might even get better, for a while. But she can’t walk, and I’m afraid she’ll starve if I’m not there to care for her!’

‘Afraid, are you?’ sneered Hildrith. ‘Path to the Dark Side, that is.’ 

Gardas wasn’t convinced she was right, but didn’t bother to argue. In his experience, kobolds labelled anything they happened to dislike, including fires and cooked food, or clothes for that matter, a path to the Dark Side. He could see Auric edging away towards the house, not wanting to get into an argument with the irritable kobold.

Beatrice was another matter. She could have stood up straight, so that she towered over the kobold, but instead she squatted in order to look into her green eyes. ‘Come off it, Nana,’ she said. ‘Don’t try to make out that fearing for those you love isn’t the witch way, or something.’

‘Oh, yes?’ retorted Hildrith. ‘Expert on the witch way, are you, young human?’

‘Just learning,’ said Beatrice. ‘And as far as I can see, the witch way involves using whatever you’ve got. If it’s love for your family that gives you the courage to defeat monsters, you use that. If it’s anger that the fairies would dare kidnap your brother, or exasperation that a monster that makes no sense can seem to exist at all, you use that.’

‘Or anger against your teacher?’ enquired Hildrith, cocking her head on one side so that her hat nearly slid off and she had to twitch an ear to keep it in place.

‘Especially that.’

Hildrith purred with amusement. ‘Learning a lot, you are,’ she said, adding sarcastically, ‘finally. Could be some rules you haven’t learnt yet, couldn’t there?’

‘There aren’t any rules, except maybe one: don’t treat people as things. If you tell people they mustn’t ever be afraid, or mustn’t love anyone enough that they can be afraid for that person, you’re telling them to make themselves into something that isn’t human.’

‘Not human, though, is she?’ Hildrith retorted, twitching an ear at Willow. ‘Any more than me.’

‘Well, no, not completely human, but she’s a person, and loves her family, don’t you?’ Beatrice asked, turning back to Willow.

‘I shouldn’t,’ whispered Willow miserably. ‘I should hate those who love me as I hate myself. But I have a duty to honour my parents. That isn’t the same as love.’

‘I think,’ said Beatrice, ‘that when you’re under a curse and you’ve got less than a thirtieth of a soul in you, you aren’t always able to judge what you “should” or “shouldn’t” do. And sometimes that means you can’t co-operate with what a healer tries to do to help you. But you know you need to care for your mother, and you know now that you need to undo the curse, and if anyone other than Xanthus can help you with that, Granny Flint can. Nana Hildrith and I were going over to her cave this evening anyway, and we can easily take you with us. The broomstick won’t carry you, me and Nana, but I’m sure Gardas can carry us in his dragon form, if we all climb on his back.’

Both Hildrith and Willow recoiled at this suggestion. ‘Not with YOU, we don’t!’ growled Hildrith at Willow, at the same time as Willow exclaimed, ‘I’m not riding a DRAGON!’

‘I assure you, you don’t need to be afraid of Gardas,’ said Beatrice.

‘I’m not AFRAID of dragons – I hate them!’ said Willow. ‘They are the embodiment of evil!’

Beatrice cast a reassuring, ‘Take no notice, she’s raving,’ look at Gardas before turning back to Willow. ‘Some dragons are evil, yes,’ she said. ‘Just like some humans. And most aren’t. Just as most humans aren’t. Gardas has been under more pressure to be evil than anyone I know, and has resisted, and that makes him probably the bravest person I know.’

‘Humans are the embodiment of evil, too,’ said Willow. ‘But were-creatures are the worst, because we’re a crime against nature. We must be destroyed!’

‘Maybe you need to think about that AFTER getting your curse removed,’ Beatrice repeated. ‘In the meantime, maybe you could sit behind me on my broom and Nana Hildrith could ride Gardas? Or I could ride Gardas and you could sit behind Nana, if you prefer? How do you feel about kobolds, compared with humans and dragons?’

‘I – think I prefer humans,’ said Willow reluctantly.

‘Fine, well, I’ll pack some refreshments, and then let’s be off,’ said Beatrice. It was earlier than they had intended to set off, but after all, it’d probably be nearly sunset by the time they arrived, and Granny Flint was a fairly early riser, and as the mouth of her cave faced north, it wasn’t as if she was in much danger of direct sunlight if she got up before sunset or was still up when the sun rose. In the meantime, Auric could keep an eye on Perdita and Hazel.

Gardas went up to his room to take his clothes off and wrap a loose blanket around himself, and then went outside to get changed. He wished he dared talk to Willow, and explain that he, too, had once been the slave of someone who made him feel that he was evil just for being a were-dragon, and that he’d escaped, and so could she. But he wasn’t sure how you talked to a were-dragon who hated were-dragons, and anyway, after Granny Flint had taken away her curse, things would be different. They hadn’t even warned her that Granny Flint was a troll, he noticed. Most humans considered that trolls were all sadistic, narcissistic psychopaths, generally before they’d even met one.

In the meantime, his body rippled into the strong, scaly shape of a Black dragon. He flapped his wings, stretched out his head and tail as far as they would go, and then lay down at a convenient height for riders to mount. ‘ _I’m ready – come and climb on!_ ’ he called.

Hildrith, muttering about the impatience and bad manners of young dragons today, scrambled onto his back. At a discreet distance, Beatrice and Willow were getting the broom started.

Gardas had let a number of people ride on his back, over the years. In fact, it hadn’t been until a couple of years ago that he had felt he could trust himself enough to fly out without a rider to talk to him, keep him in touch with sanity, and deter him from setting fire to things and attacking people. Most often, his rider was Paul, or the kobold Eski. Kobolds had been friendly with dragons for as long as anyone could remember, and Nana Hildrith was just as skilful a rider as Eski. Gardas tried not to feel disappointed. Maybe, when the curse was lifted, it would stop Willow hating him, and then, it might be Willow’s body sitting warm and soft against his back. Or Willow in dragon form once more, flying beside him through the night. A witch as powerful as Granny Flint couldn’t take more than an hour or two to solve the problem, surely?


	5. Chapter 5

Beatrice landed the broom among the patches of grass, gorse, and, well, broom, outside Granny Flint’s cave. If her fellow witches had been human, she could have started a fire and set a cauldron over it to boil – or, better still, just asked Gardas to blow flame at a cauldron until the water reached boiling point. She might have advanced from Maiden to Mother, but, as the junior witch by several hundred years, it was still her job to make the tea. However, trolls aren’t comfortable around fire, so instead she had made preparations in advance.

She took the bag that she had slung over her shoulder, and drew out a tin bottle which felt moderately – but, and this was the important part, only moderately – warm to the touch. Next, she took out three sturdy earthenware mugs for herself, Nana Hildrith and Willow, and a bowl for Gardas to lap out of. Trolls didn’t like hot drinks, and Granny Flint could easily get herself a cup of lime cordial from the spring that flowed through her cave.

‘Tea, Nana?’ she said nonchalantly, as Nana Hildrith clambered down from Gardas’s back. Willow stood warily out of the way of dragon and kobold.

The kobold’s whiskers twitched, trying to look sceptical rather than impressed. ‘Had time to make that before we set off, did you?’

‘Earlier this afternoon, before you came.’

‘Be cold by now, won’t it?’ sniffed the kobold.

Beatrice poured her a mugful. Nana Hildrith grasped the handle with one paw, supporting the far side of the mug with the other, and winced slightly at how hot it was. Still, she hadn’t been a witch for eight hundred years without learning to sound superior and unsurprised and faintly disapproving of everything. ‘Magic flask, is it?’ she sniffed.

‘That’s right. Auric charmed it for me as a Yule present.’

‘Takes much magic to keep the spells on, does it?’ said Nana Hildrith sourly. Witches traditionally did not use magic for mundane purposes like housework. Partly this was because it was more trouble than it was worth – train the crockery to wash itself up, and your mug might decide to go off and have a bath just because you paused too long between sips of tea. But mostly, it was because being a witch depended on being in touch with reality. Every time you used magic, you changed what reality was, and it was harder and harder to remember how reality worked for all the people around you who weren’t magical.

‘No, none at all. That’s the clever part – if it needed a warming spell when I wanted to carry hot tea, we’d need to take that off and put a cooling spell on when I wanted cold water on a hot day, and so on. This just took one spell to conjure out the insides of the walls of the bottle – from between the outside and the inside that touches whatever’s inside,’ she added, realising she was babbling. Why was it that she could be wise and confident in front of everyone in the village, in front of Auric and Gardas and the children, and yet talking to Nana Hildrith made her feel as if she was still a Maiden of eleven? ‘So there’s a thick layer of Nothing inside the walls, and nothing can get past Nothing – the heat can’t get out from the tea, or in from the sun’s warmth on a hot day,’ she concluded. ‘Willow, do you want some tea? And a scone?’ she added.

‘Blessed are ye that hunger and thirst, but woe unto you that are full!’ said Willow, with the air of someone who had had this saying beaten into her many times. It was one of the Gnomic utterances that were recorded in the holy books. You could find books like that, written out in the most beautiful calligraphy the scribes could manage, with colour illustrations illuminated with real gold leaf, in most of the bigger temples – certainly in the Temple of All Gods in Drakespring, and at the monasteries at Lindmere and Woadhill. Clerics usually had to go through years of training, discussing with their masters what such sayings meant. Willow, on the other hand, seemed to grab them and run with the most obvious meaning, like a dragonet snatching a sparrow out of the air.

‘Uh, Willow, these Gnomic utterances probably make a lot of sense in the original Gnomic, to the gnomes who came up with them,’ Beatrice tried to explain. ‘That doesn’t mean that when we humans read them translated into Westron, we can assume they mean what they sound as though they mean.’

Willow shrank back even further, unwilling to discuss the matter. Beatrice decided there wasn’t much point in arguing, though Willow was desperately thin and weak with hunger. When had she last eaten? Well, maybe seeing other people eating and drinking might encourage her. ‘Gardas, would you like some tea? And a scone?’

‘ _Yes, please,_ ’ said Gardas, but avoided stepping any closer in case he alarmed Willow further. Beatrice poured out a generous bowl of tea for him, then opened the biscuit tin and handed him a scone, which disappeared into his huge, reptilian mouth in a moment without leaving so much as a crumb.

‘Nana, would you like a scone?’ she added. ‘They’ve got currants in, and dried apple.’

‘Much too sugary, that sort of thing,’ grumbled Nana Hildrith. ‘Rots my teeth, it really does.’

‘Oh well, never mind,’ said Beatrice, pouring herself a drink, then taking one scone from the biscuit tin and making as if to replace the tin in her bag.

Nana Hildrith hastily held out a paw. ‘Never said I didn’t want one, did I?’

Beatrice handed her a scone, suppressing a grin. For a moment, they munched in silence, as the sun set over a fold in the landscape. It wasn’t technically sunset yet – Cideria had so many hills and valleys that the sun disappeared long before it actually got dark – but they weren’t in direct sunlight, and that was good enough for Granny Flint. She strode out now from the cleft in the rock-face that was the opening to her cave.

‘Who brought this – THING here?’ she demanded, her sharp blue-grey eyes glaring at Willow.

‘I did,’ said Beatrice, trying not to let her voice shake. Nana Hildrith grumbled and was sarcastic just to score points, but Granny Flint didn’t get angry unless there was something to be seriously angry about. ‘This is Willow Thra, the daughter of Wendy and Harry Thra. She put a curse on herself when she was a young child, too young to know what she was doing, and now she needs it removed.’

‘I did know what I was doing!’ Willow retorted. ‘For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’ (Another piece of wisdom stolen from the gnomes, Beatrice was fairly sure – most of their teachings were expressed in questions, riddles, jokes, paradoxes, and sarcasm.) ‘But she who hates her soul will cast it away because she hates it, and ask nothing in return.’ (That didn’t sound like something any sage, whether gnome or human or any other species, would ever say.) ‘I cut off thirty-one thirty-seconds of my soul – without harming any creature except myself, I might add – because I wanted to be a good person, and only the good die young. But now that I’m close to my time, I find my mother is ill, and I need to beg another thirty-second of my life back, so that I can live long enough to nurse her.’

‘And after that?’ asked Granny Flint coldly.

‘Then if I die when I’m sixty, it may not be young for a human, but it’s still younger than if I’d kept my whole soul and perhaps lived to be a thousand, so it’s better,’ said Willow.

‘Don’t know what you’ve done, do you?’ said Hildrith incredulously. ‘Know where you’re going when you die, do you?’

‘To Hell, of course,’ said Willow calmly. ‘For I was shapen in iniquity, and every imagination of my heart was only evil from my youth. But if there’s less of me left, there’s less evil, so there’ll be less of me to suffer in Hell, because most of me is detached and already there.’

‘You’ve said it,’ said Granny Flint.

‘Stop it!’ cried Beatrice. ‘Can’t you see she’s out of her mind? She’s contradicting herself from one minute to the next, saying she did this because she wanted to be good, and then claiming that every thought she’s had ever since she was a child is evil. You didn’t treat Gardas like this, when he’d harmed far more people than just himself!’

‘Willow doesn’t KNOW how many people she’s harming,’ said Granny Flint.

‘Willow,’ said Beatrice gently, trying to humour the crazed woman, ‘if you think everything you’ve ever thought of doing was bad, does that mean splitting your soul was bad, too?’

‘No. That’s the one thing I’ve done that didn’t come from my evil heart. It’s the one thing I’m not sorry for. But if you won’t help me, I’d better go home and say goodbye to my mother before I die.’

‘A good idea, that isn’t,’ said Nana Hildrith. ‘Better off without you, she is.’

Willow ignored her, and began walking away.

‘What are you doing?’ Beatrice demanded of the two older witches. ‘You can see how weak she is! You’re not going to let her walk home in the dark, are you?’ demanded Beatrice of the two older witches.

‘No, we’re not,’ said Granny Flint grimly. ‘Gardas, can you take care of this?’

‘ _Oh, yes!_ ’ said Gardas, lashing his tail in excitement. He started forward, quickly overtaking Willow, and snatched her up in his jaws. He took off, and flapped off into the sky.

‘ _Gardas, no!_ ’ called Beatrice in Dragonese. She didn’t speak much of the language, as she didn’t spend as much time with Gardas when he was in dragon form as Paul did, but she hoped that the Dragonese words she did know might get through to him. But he was either out of earshot, or ignoring her.

‘Have you any IDEA how painful that’s going to be for Gardas?’ Beatrice demanded angrily. ‘He was brought up to be a Dark Lord’s attack-dragon, he’s spent the last five years trying to learn how to live as a normal decent person, and now you tell him to kill a helpless madwoman?’

‘Didn’t look upset, did he?’ Hildrith pointed out.

‘Well, not NOW, but how’s he going to feel when he realises what he’s done?’ Beatrice retorted.

‘If he’s sensible, he’ll find out that he’s saved Cideria,’ said Granny Flint. ‘Couldn’t you sense what was in Willow? Hildrith could, couldn’t you?’ Hildrith nodded. ‘That wasn’t just madness, or even an ordinary curse – it’s an infectious curse. It’s already spread to her mum, by the sound of things. At a low level, it’s spread to the land – haven’t you felt how off the seasons have been, the past year? She’s close to her time, but she’s got a few months yet – I could feel them in her. If she lives those out, everyone who’s close to her, or close to someone who’s close to her, and so on, will die. I don’t mean physically close, like being sneezed on. I mean, anyone who loves her – maybe that’s only her mum, because young Willow doesn’t seem the type to make many friends – then all her mum’s friends, and the dragons her mum trained, and their owners, and the dragons’ owners’ friends, and so on and so on. They don’t need to have been near her in years – they’ll feel the curse tugging on them, like a hook in their hearts. If Gardas is starting to fall for her, let’s just hope he has the sense to eat her before it’s too late.’

‘And if he doesn’t?’ said Beatrice.

‘Then you’d better forget you ever cared about him,’ said Granny Flint. ‘Because if the curse spreads to you, it’ll spread to your whole village. Just go home on the broom, and forget you ever had a were-dragon.’

‘Wait a minute,’ said Beatrice. ‘This is what you told me fifteen years ago, isn’t it? “Forget you ever had a son.” When Azalar was starting to gain power over in the Downs, with Gardas as his henchman, and I KNEW Paul and his adoptive parents would be in danger, and we were putting a quarantine spell round the Downsland? And I could have ignored you, couldn’t I, and flown in before the quarantine spell was complete? And if I had, I might have brought Gardas to his senses, between us we could have killed Azalar, his reign of terror would have been finished ten years earlier than it actually was, and Paul would have been safe and unharmed and free to stay with Bara and Sammaron or come and live with me, as he chose. And you’d have been proud of me for defeating Azalar, wouldn’t you?’ The two older witches nodded. ‘And you’d have been even prouder of me for having the courage to defy you two, wouldn’t you?’ They nodded again, Nana Hildrith sniggering. ‘But because I was a good little apprentice, I did as I was told, and so I stayed an apprentice, and people in the Downs – lots of people, not just Paul and Gardas and Bara and Sammaron and Auric – suffered because of my decision. So, I just want to clarify: that was a test, wasn’t it?’

The two older witches nodded again.

‘So – is this a test, too?’

‘No,’ said Granny Flint and Nana Hildrith, very firmly, in unison. ‘This is real,’ Granny Flint added.

‘But you’d say that if it was a test, wouldn’t you?’ Beatrice pointed out.

‘Yes,’ said Granny Flint. ‘But here, we’re saying it because it isn’t a test.’

‘But you’d say that if it was a test, too…’ Beatrice began, feeling than ever more like a ridiculous, wrong-headed child who keeps on asking the same question over and over.

‘Sleep, that’s what you need,’ said Nana Hildrith kindly. ‘Take the broom home now, there’s a good girl. Got things to talk about, we have.’

Beatrice packed the refreshments things in her bag, and took off, rising high enough to get a good view over the landscape, and, she hoped, catch sight of Gardas. But it was already too dark to make him out, and besides, he was a good flyer and could easily have devoured Willow and been home long before her, if he had wanted to come home. If he still considered Beatrice’s cottage to be his home. More likely, he’d have fled to Wyrms. Probably a country of dragons was the best thing for him right now. If only he hadn’t been infected with this curse, perhaps to pass it on to the dragons of Wyrms as well…

There was no sign of Gardas when she arrived home. Auric was already in bed and asleep, being used to the odd hours that witches kept, and Perdita was sleeping peacefully as if the odd events of the afternoon hadn’t troubled her in the slightest. Probably she had dismissed it all as grown-up talk – well, everything except the fate of the poor worm, and worries about what happened to goats, at any rate.

Paul was still awake, reading by candlelight in his bedroom. ‘You’ll strain your eyes, reading by dim light like that,’ said Beatrice reprovingly.

‘Yeah, love you too, Mum,’ said Paul, yawning. ‘Is Gardas coming in?’

‘No, he’s – he didn’t come home with me. The meeting was a bit more stressful than usual…’

‘Because of that lady were-dragon with a curse on her? Auric told me about that when I came back from Princess’s house.’

‘It’s to do with that, yes. Anyway, Gardas needs a bit of time to himself, and I don’t know when he’ll be back – he might have gone to spend some time in Wyrms.’

‘Yeah, let off some steam bashing up Obashu,’ said Paul, rolling his eyes at the eccentricities of his biological father.

‘Something like that, yes. Anyway, I was wondering – could I borrow the scale for a minute?’

‘Sure.’

There was no point trying to forget Gardas, Beatrice knew – he was unforgettable. All she could do was try to proof him against being devastated by what he’d had to do. The scale didn’t send verbal messages, only emotions, but she hoped she could put into it enough love and acceptance that Gardas would read the underlying message: _Whatever happens, you’re always welcome to come home._


	6. Chapter 6

By the time Gardas reached Woadhill, he was exhausted. Like most Black dragons, he was scarcely bigger than a horse. Perdita was already larger in dragon form than he was. He could easily have flown with two women as thin and wasted as Willow on his back, but carrying her in his mouth while trying not to bite her made his teeth ache. As he gripped her midriff, he tried to bend his neck down so that he could stretch out his front paws on either side to give Willow’s head and legs more support. 

Willow smelled both delicious (according to Shadow) and sexy (according to the human part of Gardas’s mind). However (and he tried to focus on this aspect), she also smelled frightened and despairing. Gardas knew that he was drooling, partly from the confused mixture of desires in him, but mainly just from the physical effort of gripping something in his teeth. He must be soaking Willow’s clothes, but she didn’t even bother to scream or struggle.

He knew Granny Flint had meant him to kill Willow, but she hadn’t actually said that, in so many words. She’d just said, ‘take care of this.’ So, if he took good care of Willow and made sure she got home safely, he was just obeying orders. Anyway, Granny Flint wasn’t his master and didn’t have the right to give him orders. But on the other hand, she was Beatrice’s mentor, which sort of made her Beatrice’s master, even though witches claimed to be non-hierarchical. And Gardas had decided as soon as he came to Cideria that Beatrice was his new master. She didn’t really want to be his master, so he tried not to talk about it to her, but Gardas felt that, after his mind had been screwed up by nineteen years of having Azalar as his master, he needed at least the same amount of time with a good master in order to get over it. So, if Granny Flint was his sort-of master’s sort-of master, that meant she was only his sort-of sort-of master, so it didn’t matter very much if he sort-of disobeyed her. But on the other hand, Beatrice had called out ‘ _no!_ ’ to him as he’d flown off, and he’d definitely disobeyed her.

Anyway, concentrate on getting Willow home. He hadn’t been to Woadhill in the dark before, nor flown there from Granny Flint’s cave, but his sense of direction was usually pretty good in dragon form. The town of Woadhill nestled at the foot of Woad Hill itself, which was a great limestone mound sticking up from the plains around it. On a misty day – and most mornings in Cideria at least started off misty – Woad Hill looked like an island standing out of a sea of mist. In past times, it had sometimes been an island.

Everyone in Cideria knew the story of the Great Flood. There were many versions, but they generally went something like this:

‘As the farmers of Cideria grew in number, they found that there wasn’t enough land for them all to farm, and so they stole land that belonged to Sea. They waited until she had gone out, and then they cast a spell to stop her getting back onto her land.

‘So Sea was angry, but because of the spell, she couldn’t rush in and drown the thieves. So instead, she called out to her sister Rain that the humans were casting spells to steal the whole world, so that there would be nowhere left for the people of the sea, the selkies and the mermaids and the krakens, to live. And Sky was so overcome with grief and anger at the insult done to her sister Sea and her subjects that she wept for forty days, and flooded the land of Cideria.

‘So every creature on land who could fly, like the dragons, flew up into the air. But every creature that could not fly – the humans and the kobolds and the trolls and the centaurs, and all the animals – hurried to the high ground. But the floods kept on rising, and soon the smaller hills were cut off.

‘So the dragons carried people from the lower hills to the higher hills, and then from the higher hills to the mountains of the island of Wyrms, where they would be high above the floods. The last people to be taken from Cideria were those waiting on Woad Hill, the highest point in Cideria. And while Cideria was flooded, the flightless people of Cideria waited in Wyrms, and the dragons brought them food.

‘But in the meantime King Sun saw Rain crying, and he asked, “What is wrong? Why are you crying?”

‘Rain said, “Sire, the humans are trying to steal all the land from my sister Sea, and her people will have nowhere to live.”

‘King Sun said, “I will set boundaries for the countries of the land, saying, ‘You may come so far, and no further.’ I will give three-quarters of the world to Sea, and only one quarter to the people of the land. But as for this little strip of land that the Ciderians and Sea are fighting over now, let the humans have it to farm. I will command them to dig ditches between every field, and you can fill the ditches with water and cause them to teem with frogs and reeds and fish and herons, so that the humans will remember that the land is not theirs alone.”

‘Rain was pleased with this, and so she stopped crying. She fell in love with King Sun, and they had two daughters, Wobniar and Rainbow. Wobniar, the older sister, was quiet and shy, but Rainbow was bright and colourful and loved to be seen. 

‘So one day, a dragon out flying saw Rainbow and Wobniar in the north, and was amazed to see two such beautiful nymphs. She asked, “Whose children are you?”

‘Rainbow and Wobniar answered, “Our father is standing behind you.”

‘So the dragon turned in the air and looked south and saw King Sun reaching down to gather up the floodwater, bucketful by bucketful, so that the top of Woad Hill was already showing. So the dragons began to bring people back, a few at a time as there was space for them. 

‘When the flood was gone, the people dug ditches in honour of Rain and Sea. And they also built a temple on top of Woad Hill to honour King Sun and thank him for saving them. And that is why, every year at Midsummer, pilgrims walk barefoot up to the top of Woad Hill.

‘And to this day, after it has rained, sometimes when you look up, you will see Rainbow in the sky. Her bands of colour, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet and Octarine, remind us that Rain Only Yields Great Blessings If Venerated Occasionally. And outside Rainbow stands Wobniar, with her arms around her little sister to protect her. You can’t always see her, but she is always there, and if you have good eyes you will see her, with her bands of Octarine, Violet, Indigo, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange and Red.’

Gardas tried to find somewhere to land near the Thras’ hatchery. There was a large exercise pen behind the house, but it had a dense network of bars across the top, to stop young hatchlings from flying away – or anyone from flying in. Instead, Gardas landed in the street, outside the front door. As she staggered to her feet, Willow muttered wearily, ‘Thank you,’ before going indoors. With the sharp senses of his dragon body, he could hear a whimper of fear from someone ill and weak – old Mrs Thra? – and then Willow’s voice – ‘How’s she been?’

‘She won’t sleep, but she’s been very weak all day,’ said another woman’s voice, one Gardas didn’t recognise. ‘She won’t open her mouth to eat or drink – just lies there. Frankly, hiding under the bedclothes when you came in is the most activity I’ve seen from her.’

‘I’ll take over from here,’ said Willow, stifling a yawn. ‘You’ve had a long day.’

‘So have you,’ said the other woman. ‘Come on, Willow – if I stay the night, we can at least take turns to keep an eye on Wendy. Rodney’s fine to look after my children until I can get back. Or I can stay with Wendy while you feed your dragons. I put some food down for them earlier, but I don’t know a lot about those creatures.’

‘Please, Gail. Just go home and get some rest. She’s my mother. I can take things from here.’

‘Well, if you’re sure. I’ll be back in the morning,’ said Gail worriedly.

‘I’ll be fine. We’ll be fine. Please.’

Gail reluctantly left, edging warily around Gardas, who could smell her fear.

Upstairs, Gardas could hear Willow’s voice, halfway between pleading and commanding – ‘Come on, Mother, you’ve got to eat. Open up, now,’ and Mrs Thra groaning in protest while keeping her jaws firmly clamped. 

Downstairs in the hatchery, he could hear hatchlings calling out in protest, too: ‘ _Hungry!_ ’ ‘ _Want Green Mummy!_ ’ ‘ _Green Mummy ill?_ ’ ‘ _Aww, poor Green Mummy!_ ’ ‘ _Gamboge lady ill._ ’ ‘ _Gamboge lady scary._ ’ ‘ _Want Green Mummy!_ ’

Wasn’t Willow going to come and feed them? How dare she pester her mother, who just wanted to be left alone, and not come and feed the hatchlings, who were obviously hungry and desperate for attention? Poor hatchlings, poor Wendy – and poor Willow, who was obviously exhausted. It wasn’t fair on any of them. He ought to be in there to help.

But what could he do? Since he had lost his magic powers, he wasn’t able to change shape at will. He could be changed by any capable witch or wizard (usually Beatrice), and sometimes he changed himself involuntarily into a dragon when he was overwhelmed by anger or frustration, or fear for someone he loved, and needed to be a dragon in order to protect them. But now, when he already was a dragon, it was completely the wrong shape to protect the little Gules hatchlings from neglect, or Willow from collapsing with exhaustion.

‘ _It’s not fair!_ ’ growled Gardas, and as he growled, he could feel his shape changing and shrinking, his wings retracting into his body. He staggered up onto his hind paws – yes, they were still paws, and he still had sharp claws on his fingers, too, but might the fingers be capable of turning a door-handle, and maybe holding a spoon? The only time he’d managed this sort of part-transformation before, it had been in the other direction, and then only because he had sensed himself starting to take dragon shape and managed to stop himself in time. He was naked, of course, but – he patted his groin with one forepaw – his two penises were safely tucked away inside the base of his tail. So he still had a tail, but no wings, which made sense – walking upright, he needed what would otherwise be wings to turn back into his ribcage.

He managed to turn the doorknob, with some difficulty – his claws were too long, and the pads of his toes too hard and scaly to grip – and let himself in. Three Gules hatchlings rushed at him excitedly, calling, ‘ _Black dragon Daddy!_ ’

‘ _Hello,_ ’ said Gardas, reaching down to tickle the hatchlings with his long foreclaws. ‘ _You be good, and I’ll be down soon to put you to bed, as soon as I’ve seen your Mummy._ ’

‘ _Daddy!_ ’ called one of the hatchlings, grabbing the spines of Gardas’s tail with her sharp little teeth.

‘ _Stop snatchling, hatchling,_ ’ said Gardas. ‘ _I’ll be down soon. Promise._ ’

He made his way upstairs, his tail dragging on the floor. He was rather taller than he was in human form – about seven feet tall instead of his usual six foot six – and felt about two stone heavier, most of which seemed to be his armoured scales and his tail. In full dragon form, he’d never even noticed his weight, but in full dragon form he wasn’t trying to walk on his hind paws.

In one of the upstairs bedrooms, he could hear Willow still pleading, ‘Please, Mother, I know you don’t want me to feed you, but you can’t feed yourself, you’re weak with hunger, and if I don’t feed you, I’ll burn in Hell.’

The old woman in the bed – and even though he’d seen her only a couple of weeks earlier, Gardas could hardly recognise Mrs Thra now that she looked even older than she had on Maidensday – whimpered and tried to wriggle under the covers. Willow held the blankets back with one hand, and tried to force a spoonful of gruel between her mother’s jaws with the other, while holding the bowl containing the gruel in the crook of her arm.

‘ _Can I help?_ ’ asked Gardas.

Willow yelped in shock and dropped the bowl of gruel on the bed – where some of it splashed over the blankets – but Mrs Thra beamed delightedly.

‘ _Beatrice taught me quite a bit about nursing,_ ’ Gardas explained. ‘ _And Granny Flint told me to take care of you, and to do that, I need to help look after your mother, and the dragonets. Will you trust me?_ ’

‘You’re evil,’ said Willow coldly. ‘All were-dragons are evil. But my god says, “Resist not evil.”’ She righted the remains of the bowl of gruel, placed it on the chest of drawers beside the bed, and went out.

Gardas picked up the bowl and the spoon – easier than doorknobs, as he could splay the claws of one large forepaw to hold the bowl, and grip the spoon between finger-claw and thumb-claw of the other paw. Mrs Thra opened her mouth wide, but Gardas, to be on the safe side, fed her only a tiny amount on the tip of a spoon to start with. She gulped it down, and opened her mouth wider still, like a baby bird – or a baby dragon – to indicate that she wanted more. Supper was finished in a few minutes, and she settled down to sleep. Gardas wetted a flannel to wipe the old woman’s mouth, which she accepted, and then searched in the chest of drawers until he found a clean blanket. When he tried to substitute this for the stained one, however, Mrs Thra clung desperately to the blanket wrapped around her, with fingers so crooked and thin that they almost resembled claws themselves.

Gardas tried to remember what he’d left out. Oh, yes: talking. He’d never been good at making conversation, especially with people he didn’t know well, but Beatrice would certainly have told him off for forgetting to say hello to a patient. ‘ _I’m Gardas,_ ’ he said. ‘ _I’m Paul’s dragon – you know, Paul, the boy who comes in here – well, you’ve seen me when I’m human, when you came to Beatrice’s house a couple of weeks ago, and you’ve seen me in dragon form, and this is what I’m like when I’m in between. But anyway, I…_ ’ He couldn’t really think what to say, what excuse to make for his being here. Willow said he was evil, and though Mrs Thra seemed to trust him, she had now fallen asleep. Gardas sniffed, and couldn’t detect any scent of urine or faeces, though he didn’t know whether she was incontinent and needed any kind of padding. At any rate, he didn’t want to disturb her now, and didn’t feel up to trying to have a conversation with Willow.

He returned to the hatchery downstairs, where the three dragonets were playing, and two more eggs, he now saw, were being heated in ovens. Dragon eggs could be left up to eleven years before being warmed, but if you let the egg get too cold after you had started incubating, the dragonet would die. Gardas shovelled firewood into the furnaces under the ovens, then turned to the hatchlings – or rather, tried to turn to them, as one was chewing on his tail-spines and the other two were climbing up his back.

‘ _All right, kids,_ ’ he said. ‘ _I’ll get supper for you, and then we’ll have a bedtime story, and then it’s time to go to sleep, okay?_ ’

‘ _Daddy!_ ’ called the dragonets happily.

‘ _Do you know where your Mummy keeps the food?_ ’

‘ _Hungry!_ ’ said one of the hatchlings, but they didn’t venture any further details. Gardas could smell meat nearby, and after a quick search, he found a larder with a cooling spell on it, in which a number of rabbits, rats, squirrels, and other small creatures were hanging up. Gardas took out two rabbits, tore one into segments for the dragonets, and ate the other himself. The dragonets licked his muzzle, making sure not a drop of blood or a wisp of fur went to waste.

‘ _Now for a story,_ ’ said Gardas. ‘ _Do you know the story of the Great Flood of Cideria?_ ’ The dragonets said nothing intelligible, but snuggled up to him. Gardas lay down on the floor to be down on their level as he began to tell the story. But before he reached the part about King Sun, he and all the dragonets were fast asleep.

As Gardas drifted off, his foreleg tingled. He could feel Beatrice sending him a message of love and acceptance – but also pity and sadness, and what felt like _goodbye._ Still, he was too sleepy to work out what that meant. He could worry about it in the morning.


	7. Chapter 7

Beatrice made her way into her bedroom in the dark, so that not even a candle’s light would disturb Auric. She slipped in beside her husband without undressing – after all, the loose green robe she wore was as comfortable to wear in bed as a nightshirt anyway. Auric stirred, rolled over, and kissed her. He was wearing only a pair of underpants in bed, with the unseasonable heat making even their house, with its thick stone walls and thatched roof, feel uncomfortably warm. Auric wrapped a comforting arm around her, and Beatrice eased off her robe and dropped it on the floor before snuggling her face against the golden hair of her husband’s chest.

‘How are you feeling?’ Auric asked quietly.

‘Tired. Drained. Too tired for sex,’ Beatrice added regretfully. She could feel a bulge further down the bed, and, if she had been less tired and less anxious about Gardas, she would have liked to seize the moment.

‘Do I take it Flint was as unwilling to help as Hildrith?’ Auric asked.

‘Yes. She called Willow a “thing”, and said she didn’t know how many people she’d harmed, and then she told Gardas to deal with her.’

‘Oh, gods,’ sighed Auric. ‘The first female were-dragon he’s met who isn’t either much too young for him or in love with someone else, and he’s supposed to – what did Flint tell him to do, exactly?’

‘Well, her precise words were “take care of this,” so he might decide to take her literally and try to nurse Willow, and probably old Mrs Thra as well…’

‘Gardas as a mind-healer? Good grief!’

‘It’s worse than that, I’m afraid,’ Beatrice went on. ‘Granny Flint didn’t actually spell it out until after Gardas had flown off with Willow, but she’s carrying an emotionally infectious curse that will kill anyone who loves her, and anyone who loves those people, if they can’t close their hearts to them.’

‘So we’re all dead,’ said Auric flatly.

‘We don’t know that,’ said Beatrice, grasping at straws. ‘We don’t know how strongly Gardas feels about Willow. After all, he’s been to pick Paul up from the dragon hatchery enough times, and he’d never even mentioned Mrs Thra having a daughter. I got the impression that they hadn’t even spoken to each other before today.’

‘But they have now,’ Auric pointed out. ‘Didn’t you see the way he was looking into her eyes? How often have you known Gardas to make eye contact with ANYONE? Even you?’

‘Not often,’ Beatrice admitted.

‘You’ve seen Paul’s Dragon Studies textbook, haven’t you? There isn’t much in the chapter on were-dragons, but one thing it does say is that when they meet their life-mate, there’s an instant connection, and that in ancient times, it was believed that this was because each were-dragon was born with one half of a human soul and one half of a dragon’s soul, and that they needed to find the partner who carried the other halves.’

‘But that’s just a legend made up by people who’d never even met a real were-dragon,’ Beatrice protested. 

‘Is it? Look at Paul’s friend Maz. She’s a pretty, popular girl, plenty of boys at school liked her, but she’d never had a boyfriend until she met Martin, and then they just instantly clicked.’

‘But why should that have anything to do with split souls? Most were-dragons don’t have split personalities like Gardas, after all. Gardas never used to until…’

‘Until I destroyed his magic,’ said Auric sombrely. ‘It was the worst thing I’ve ever done in my life. It’s quite unforgiveable.’

‘It’s inexcusable,’ said Beatrice. ‘I’m not sure anything is unforgiveable. After all, Paul’s forgiven Gardas for doing the same to him.’

‘Paul can be a normal human without being a wizard,’ Auric pointed out. ‘Gardas can’t be a normal were-dragon ever again.’

‘He can’t be the same were-dragon that he would have been otherwise. That doesn’t mean that he can’t live a good life as the were-dragon he is now. He’s conscious of Shadow as a separate personality, but in some ways that helps him to understand why his dragon-impulses feel strange to the human part of him, and the other way round. Apart from that, he can’t change from dragon to human on his own – or not at the moment, anyway,’ Beatrice added thoughtfully. ‘We don’t know whether he’ll find some other way of controlling his transformations, but he’s better at it than he was five years ago. He can go from human to dragon when he chooses, rather than doing it by accident when he loses his temper, and sometimes he catches himself accidentally turning into a dragon and stops halfway. That’s impressive progress for someone who supposedly doesn’t have magic powers, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Yes, but he still can’t be like the other were-dragons – like Maz and Martin, or even Perdita, who’s five years old! How would you feel, if you couldn’t care for yourself to the extent that a five-year-old can?’

‘I think the important thing is how Gardas feels,’ Beatrice pointed out. ‘Yes, he’s got problems which mean he can’t live alone, because he needs someone with magic powers – whether that’s a were-dragon, or a human magic-user like us, or whoever – to work the transformation spell for him. But do you know if he even wants to live alone? He’s one of the most sociable people I know – not that he’s comfortable mixing at large parties, I mean, but he sticks closely to the friends he does trust.’

‘And you’ve managed to win his trust. So has Paul, even. But I can’t – not after what I’ve done.’

‘Oh, he trusts you. You may have taken his magic, but you shielded him from being put to death, and went into exile with him, and you trusted him with Paul. He’s just awkward around you because you’re awkward around him, because you feel guilty.’

‘I’ve told him I’m sorry.’

‘I know. Repeatedly.’ Beatrice was aware that her tone was snappish and sarcastic, but she was too tired to have this discussion right now, and too tired to have enough sense to break it off. ‘As long as you feel guilty around him, he has to feel like a cripple around you. You’re capable of seeing Paul as the person he is instead of the wizard he might have been, and it’s high time you started seeing Gardas that way, too.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Auric again.

‘You’re making progress. You two get on much better after a gaming session, don’t you? Have you wondered why that is?’

‘I suppose because we’re picturing a fantasy universe where nobody has magical powers – there’s just technology.’ Although the games they played these days had mutated from the traditional Cars & Computers fantasy into an imaginary setting from the Cars & Computers universe itself, which had come to be known as Stars & Spaceships. Gardas’s Berserker character had quickly accumulated an array of exotic weapons such as nerve disruptors, plasma rifles and needler grenades. Paul had pleaded for real-life elements like magic swords, levitation and mind-reading to be incorporated into the story to make it more realistic. So far, George, as Game Master, had ruled that (a) plasma arcs were as near to magic swords as you needed; (b) there were anti-gravity devices which could be used for carrying supplies, and for crippled people to ride on; (c) he wasn’t making any promises about telepathy. At any rate, since Paul was busy studying for his final exams and Gardas had until recently been busy rehearsing for the Maidensday play, George had arranged for Paul’s character to be shot and wounded, and Gardas’s to go mad (with intermittent periods of lucidity when Gardas had time to make it to a gaming session) so that they were out of the game until further notice. Beatrice had been looking forward to having Gardas with them again soon. But now, everything had changed.

‘He thinks he wants authority figures who can be the parents he never had, but sometimes what he needs is to relate to people on equal terms,’ said Beatrice. ‘Just as when he was still a wizard, he loved duelling practice because he could compete with you as wizard to wizard, not as slave boy to freeborn boy. I suppose when he flies off to spend a weekend fighting that blue dragon friend of his, it’s the same again. But for someone to be his actual equal…’ Beatrice’s voice tailed off for a moment as she considered this. ‘They’d have to be a damaged were-dragon, wouldn’t they? Someone like Willow. But – no! Even if were-dragons really do have soul-mates, that can’t be what’s going on here. Willow doesn’t even like dragons, and she hates were-dragons more than anything. She refused to ride on Gardas, or be any closer to him than she could avoid. If there was a dragon-component to her soul, it’s probably among the bits that she’s cursed away.’

‘So maybe his human soul is in love with the human side of Willow, and Shadow would be in love with her dragon-soul if he could find it?’ mused Auric.

‘I don’t know. But if he is, and her dragon soul and fifteen-sixteenths of her human soul are already dead, what’s he supposed to do? Go into the Underworld to look for them?’ Beatrice was being sarcastic again, but it suddenly occurred to her that Gardas might try to do exactly that. He hadn’t had much to do with fiction when he was a child. No-one had told him bedtime stories when he was little. But then he had come to Cideria, and Beatrice had talked him into joining the Mummers, just to help him find a hobby and a chance to make new friends. And so, because he was Gardas and never did anything by halves, he had become absolutely obsessed with acting, and the opportunity to experiment with being a different person every three months. George, as the head of the Mummers, had been careful to cast Gardas as sympathetic characters, usually the hero, because he realised that Gardas was going to imprint on every character he played, just as the demons in the How To Train Your Demon books imprinted on every master they had ever had. 

And – well, wasn’t every Maidensday play about death and resurrection? In Gardas’s very first play, Return Of The Queen, he had been Herkle the Hunter, who wrestled Death to rescue the heroine from him. Sometimes resurrection came into the plays for the other festivals, as well. Last Solstice – which had barely felt like winter, what with the daffodils in full bloom – they had played Saving Father Yule. In this one, Gardas finally got the chance to play Death, because this was one of the stories where Death was the hero rather than the villain, and was standing in for the kidnapped Father Yule until the real Father Yule could be rescued. There was a scene in that story where Death saved the life of an orphan destined to freeze to death, because for one night he was Father Yule, a spirit who gives instead of taking. The play had ended with the real Father Yule, rescued at last, dying and rising again, as he did every year.

So – Gardas, high on drama and tales of heroism and miracles, was now possibly in love as well. If so, there was no way that he could maintain emotional detachment from Willow. By the same token, Beatrice knew that she couldn’t snuff out her love for Gardas, and that Auric, Paul and Perdita wouldn’t be able to, either.

‘What are we going to tell the kids?’ Auric murmured.

‘I’ve told Paul that Gardas might be in Wyrms. After all, he COULD go there.’

‘What? This is Beatrice speaking? You NEVER lie! Especially to children.’

‘And Paul isn’t even a child any more,’ said Beatrice wearily. ‘I just don’t know what to say. Except that, wherever Gardas is and whatever he’s doing, we need to pray for him.’

‘Mmmph.’ Auric wasn’t familiar with praying, regarding it as an arcane area of spellcasting that he wasn’t experienced in. Beatrice wasn’t sure how to explain it, except that she believed firmly that God believed in all people, regardless of whether those people believed in God or not, and that God could never cut Herself off emotionally from any person, whatever that person was going through. It must, she thought, be incredibly painful to be God.

She was too tired to focus properly, but as she drifted off to sleep, she sent a brief, silent prayer: ‘God, You know where Gardas is and what he’s going through. You know about Willow, and old Mrs Thra. I trust you with them.’ 


	8. Chapter 8

Gardas woke to the sound of a small, dragonish voice calling urgently: ‘ _Daddy? DADDY? Wake UP!_ ’

‘ _Perdita?_ ’ he mumbled sleepily, and then remembered, no, of course this wasn’t Perdita; he was babysitting some Gules dragonets. ‘ _What’s your name, kid?_ ’ he asked.

‘ _HUNGRY!_ ’ complained the dragonet.

‘ _You’ve just had rabbit,_ ’ Gardas grumbled. He didn’t feel hungry again, and one rabbit for a two-hundred-pound man-dragon had been a much lighter meal than a third of a rabbit could have been for a Gules hatchling the size of a kitten. But after all, babies needed feeding much more often than adults. When Perdita had been little, she had constantly woken him in the night, whether because she was hungry, or had wind and needed burping, or was too hot or cold, or was teething, or was just lonely and in need of a cuddle. When she was a bit older and out of nappies, she had needed to wake him for assistance with wiping after using the chamber-pot; and after she’d got the hang of sleeping through the night without needing the pot, there had been some bad experiences in Wyrms that had given Perdita and Paul (and, Gardas had to admit, himself as well) nightmares for months afterwards – and in Perdita’s case, these had been bed-wetting nightmares. It had taken nearly a year until she had trusted Gardas in his dragon-form enough to go flying with him, after that. But now, two years had passed, and they were firm friends again, and how was Perdita going to react when she found out that he was gone?

‘ _Don’t like rabbit!_ ’ whined the Gules dragonet.‘ _Want pipistrelle!_ ’

Gardas hauled himself upright, trying not to disturb the other two hatchlings, who were still curled up asleep. Unlike the nocturnal Grey dragons, he couldn’t see in the dark – and even Greys preferred bright nights at full moon to the darkness of a cave or a house. Perdita wouldn’t sleep without a candle unless the shutters of her bedroom window were open so that she could feel the moon and stars on her while she slept.

Yes. A candle, that was what he needed. Outdoors and in full dragon form, he might have found his way around by smell, or blown a jet of flame to see by. In here, if he was going to walk without knocking things over or setting fire to anything, he needed a candle. He could smell tallow nearby. He crept cautiously over to the scent, groped his talons around a candle on a shelf, brought it to his snout and carefully blew a very, very small jet of flame to light it. It wasn’t much better than nothing, but, at short range, he could make out the small dragonet now clinging to his hind leg. He lifted her up, noticing as he did so that she was wearing a collar. The collar wore a tag which, as he peered at it by candlelight, he could see read ‘Gemastrasza (Gemma)’. 

Gemastrasza took a bite out of the end of the candle, snuffing out the flame. Anyone who wasn’t a dragon would have yelped with pain, but Gemastrasza’s mouth was fireproof, and she only complained again: ‘ _HUNGRY! Want pipistrelle NOW!_ ’

Gardas relit the candle, holding it in one forepaw and the complaining dragonet in the other as he made his way to the larder. Holding the candle between his teeth, he fumbled his claws around the door-handle.

‘ _We’g gok…_ ’ he set the candle, which fortunately was thick enough to have a sturdy base, down on a shelf and tried again. ‘ _Well, Gemastrasza, we’ve got rabbits, rats, squirrels, frogs, toads, pigeons, and mice. No bats, though._ ’

‘ _Want pipistrelle!_ ’

‘ _Will mouse do? That’s sort of – like a bat, only with no wings._ ’

‘ _All right,_ ’ agreed Gemastrasza reluctantly.

Gardas took out a dead mouse and fed it to the dragonet, who gulped it down whole without bothering to chew. She sighed contentedly and had fallen asleep in the crook of his arm before he even set her down on the ground.

Gardas himself couldn’t get back to sleep so easily a second time. To his almost-humanoid form, the floor felt hard and – despite the fires keeping the ovens stoked for the two eggs – cold, and he couldn’t arrange himself comfortably. Of course, he knew that his hard spines and claws would rip bedsheets to pieces, and that there was a danger of snorting fire in his sleep and setting bedding alight. But knowing that didn’t make the floor feel any nicer. He wasn’t human enough to sleep in a proper bed and pull the blankets over his head, and wasn’t dragon enough to be able to curl the line of neck, back and tail into a comfortable ball, the way the dragonets were doing.

Being in a town felt all wrong, after five years of living in Beatrice’s cottage. He couldn’t hear normal night-time noises like tawny owlets calling ‘Kee-uk, kee-uk!’ and their parents replying ‘Hoo-hoo-hooroo-oo-oo!’ Instead, he could hear the voices of troll passers-by talking loudly and happily in the streets. Every fifteen minutes, too, he could hear a clock chiming. Woadhill was only a few miles from Drakespring, and near enough for his sharp, dragonish senses to make out the sound of the clock at the Temple of All Gods. The bells played a tune, which accompanied the ritual clashing of the clockwork knight and dragon in the temple. At a quarter past the hour, it played line one of the song; at half past the hour it played lines one and two, and so on, up to the full four-line song before striking the hour. 

The modern words were ‘O Lord our God, Thy children call: grant us Thy peace, and bless us all.’ But, lying in the dark, Gardas was uncomfortably reminded of the traditional version. Quarter past: ‘Go, valiant knight.’ Half-past: ‘Go, valiant knight; fear not, nor quake.’ Quarter to: ‘Go, valiant knight; fear not, nor quake. Take sword and smite.’ And at the hour: ‘Go, valiant knight; fear not, nor quake. Take sword and smite the fiery drake.’ Then the hour striking. Eleven o’clock. Much too late for someone who was used to getting up at dawn.

Worries chased round his head like dragonets, or like the bars of the song, too incoherent to be called thoughts exactly. How would he cope with looking after these dragonets, and keep the ovens at the right temperature for the eggs, and look after old Mrs Thra? What could he do to help Willow? What was going on back home? What if Perdita had a bad dream, and went to his room for a reassuring hug, and he wasn’t there? What if…

He was almost asleep when he heard another piercing yelp. ‘ _Daddy! I’m HUNGRY!_ ’ Not Gemastrasza again, surely? He lit the candle, and peered into the gloom to identify the squeaker. This one’s collar identified her as ‘Elistrasza (Ellie)’.

Well, if one dragonet could get hungry during the night, they all could, after all. But if he didn’t do something, they would take in turns to wake him up all night. ‘ _All right, kid,_ ’ he sighed. ‘ _I expect the others might like a snack, too._ ’ Well, probably not Gemastrasza again, but it was only a matter of time before the third baby woke. He peered with the candle at the collar of the nearest sleeping bundle, who turned out to be Gemastrasza. He was about to move on, but Gemastrasza, woken by the glimmer of candlelight, blinked and wailed: ‘ _HUNGRY! Want pipistrelle! Not mouse! Don’t like mouse!_ ’

‘ _I’ll see what I can do,_ ’ said Gardas wearily. 

By now, the third dragonet had been woken by their voices. ‘ _You WOKE me!_ ’ she growled, sinking her sharp little teeth into Gardas’s talon. ‘ _TIRED!_ ’

‘ _Yeah, sorry,_ ’ said Gardas. ‘ _But do you want something to eat, now you’re awake?_ ’

‘ _Want skylark!_ ’ mumbled the dragonet, without unclamping her teeth from Gardas’s paw, but clamping herself around his paw with all four sets of her own sharp claws and digging in with those as well. He tried to think whether there had been any skylarks in the larder. He didn’t think so, but he could check.

‘ _Want slow-worm!_ ’ put in Elistrasza. Gardas tried not to feel shocked. He remembered Perdita cooing in delight over finding one of these little bronze legless lizards in the garden. He felt sick at the idea of Elistrasza eating her fellow reptiles, even though logically he knew it was no different from a human eating bacon or a hawk eating sparrows. It was just that Perdita wouldn’t do something like that. But after all, not all dragons could live on moonlight like Perdita.

‘ _Let go of my paw, and I’ll have a look,_ ’ he said. The dragonet attached to him (Katracstrasza, known as Kat, according to her collar) sank her teeth and claws in harder. Gardas didn’t dare detach her in case her teeth broke off and the remains became infected. ‘ _Let’s have a look anyway,_ ’ he sighed, making his way to the larder with Katracstrasza wrapped around his paw. The other two dragonets followed, one (Elistrasza, he thought) repeatedly trying to climb his hind legs and slithering down until she managed to get a purchase on his tail and climbed up his back-spines, while the other (probably Gemastrasza) fluttered up to sit on his head, just in front of his horns, flopping down so that her front paws nearly obscured one eye and her tail the other. 

Gardas managed to snag the handle to the larder door open with one claw without dropping the candle, and checked the contents again. There were still no bats, just as there hadn’t been last time he looked; no birds except a couple of pigeons; and no reptiles of any kind. He pointed this out to the dragonets, who weren’t impressed.

‘ _Want SKYLARK!_ ’ growled Katracstrasza, and ‘ _Not fair! Want pipistrelle!_ ’ repeated Gemastrasza.

‘ _We’ve got pigeon,_ ’ Gardas pointed out. ‘ _That’s – a bird, like a skylark, and it flies, like a bat. And, uh, it’s related to lizards, because it lays eggs,_ ’ he added, before remembering that according to the Bestiary, slow-worms gave birth to live young. But with a bit of luck, Elistrasza might not know that.

‘ _HUNGRY! WANT PIPISTRELLE!_ ’ roared Gemastrasza, so loudly that Gardas feared she might wake the women upstairs.

‘ _If you’re that hungry, you’ll eat what we’ve got,_ ’ he said sternly, lifting the pigeon down and laying it on the floor while pushing the larder door shut with his tail. ‘ _If you don’t want it, Katracstrasza and Elistrasza can have it. You can’t be really hungry, you had a mouse an hour…_ ’ But by this point, Gemastrasza was already ripping into the pigeon’s breast-meat. The other two dragonets leapt up to fight for their share, and within a few minutes, there was scarcely a feather left.

Gardas was starting to feel more confident in his understanding of dragonet psychology as they lay down to sleep yet again. This time he fell asleep quickly.


	9. Chapter 9

He dreamed there was another dragon with him – or something that looked like a dragon, though it wasn’t like any dragon he had ever seen. It was scarcely bigger than a full-grown Gules, but it was ivory-white, with indigo wings and claws. It had no horns, and Gardas couldn’t be sure whether it was male or female, or even whether the concepts applied to such a being.

‘ _You think you’re being a good boy now, don’t you?_ ’ it jeered. ‘ _Gentle Gardas, meek and mild, getting up at all hours to feed the little hatchlings. You’re a selfish bastard at heart, aren’t you? You don’t actually care about their health, you’re just feeding them to shut them up so that you can get some sleep. You could be killing them with over-feeding, couldn’t you? Just when you’ve tricked poor Willow into leaving you unattended with them. Does she know what you’ve done? Does she know you’re the monster who terrorised the Downs for fourteen years, killed more people than you can even name, and poisoned the land with your foul breath? Does she know that even when you were a little boy, you used to hurt the other children you lived with, and you ENJOYED it? Maybe she doesn’t know everything. But she knows you’re a monster. All were-dragons are born monsters._ ’

‘ _I know,_ ’ said Gardas miserably. ‘ _But I’m trying to be better. Beatrice is teaching me…_ ’

‘ _Beatrice? Where’s Beatrice now? How do you even dare speak of her, after what you did to her? If she gives you house-room, it’s because she wants to believe there’s still some good in you. But you know the truth, and so do I. You were born evil, and if you want to be good, you must submit to me. Let me pierce your ear and lead you by it, like the animal you are._ ’

Gardas saw that the little ivory-coloured dragon was holding a chain with a ring on the end, and now it flew up to him to bite a hole in his ear. He roared with pain, and swiped at the irritating little creature with one forepaw…

And woke up to find a whimpering Katracstrasza sitting by his head. ‘ _OWWW!_ ’ she wailed. ‘ _My wing! My wing hurts!_ ’

She was bleeding; Gardas could smell that much. On the other hand, his own ear was also stinging, so the part about being bitten in the ear was probably no dream. He could also smell vomit. He lit the candle again, in time to see Gemastrasza retching up another stream of mouse-fur, pigeon-feathers, and semi-digested meat.

‘ _Stinky!_ ’ pointed out Katracstrasza, quite unnecessarily. And then, realising that she didn’t want to distract attention from her own plight: ‘ _My wing hurts! You hurt my wing!_ ’

‘ _Did you bite my ear?_ ’ Gardas asked.

‘ _Gemma’s stinky! Clear it up!_ ’

‘ _All right, when I’ve done your wing. And I’m sorry I hurt you. It was an accident._ ’ The membrane of Katracstrasza’s wing was torn, and Gardas could smell her blood on his claws. He couldn’t see very well in the dim light, but from the way she dragged her wing, he feared he might have broken some of the bones as well. Hatchlings had such delicate bones, after all. Gardas remembered some of the dragons he had seen on Wyrms who had painful, misshapen legs or tails because the old Sovereign had injured them and refused to allow them magical healing, or even commonplace non-magical splinting, until the bones had set crooked. Gardas’s friend Obashu had even suffered ten years of flightlessness, and the humiliation of having to be fed like a new hatchling, before the Sovereign had relented and healed his wings.

Well, Gardas wasn’t going to let Katracstrasza suffer like that, at any rate. He didn’t have healing fire like a Grey or a Gold, but his blood had healing properties – well, in dragon-form it did, anyway. In his halfway form, he couldn’t be sure, but it was his duty at least to try. He dug a claw into the bare spot on one wrist where he had a missing scale. Blood spurted out, but that was all right. A little drop from a small scratch probably wouldn’t be enough to heal Katracstrasza’s wound. He directed the spray of blood to the dragonet, drenching her.

‘ _Uggh, yucky!_ ’ she protested.

‘ _It’s to make you better,_ ’ Gardas explained. He wasn’t sure how much blood he could afford to lose. In dragon-form, he could donate up to a gallon at a time before he started to feel faint, for use in potions to restore the land he had blighted. But after all, he was much bigger in full dragon-form. And Beatrice could always turn him back into a human as soon as he reached the one-gallon mark, at which point the traces of dragon-blood still on him would cause him to heal instantly. At the moment, when he wasn’t much bigger than a human, he probably couldn’t afford to lose more than a pint, and considering how dizzy he was feeling, maybe he already had lost more than a pint, and he didn’t have any obvious way of stopping the bleeding. He pressed his other forepaw on his scaly foreleg just above the wound, in the hope of closing the blood vessel. It didn’t have much effect, as his scales were too hard to submit to pressure. He needed a bandage, he supposed. Where did Mrs Thra keep them?

‘ _My wing hurts,_ ’ moaned Katracstrasza. ‘ _Can’t fly!_ ’

‘ _You’ll feel better soon,_ ’ Gardas promised, hoping it was true. ‘ _Excuse me a minute._ ’ He stood up, trying to lift his wounded foreleg above his heart, and stumbled off in search of any rags he could use for dressing his wound – and Katracstrasza’s, if his blood hadn’t proved magical in half-dragon form.

He saw another light, and looked up to see Willow trudging downstairs. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked, in a voice too weary to show concern or even annoyance.

‘ _I had a bad dream and accidentally broke Katracstrasza’s wing,_ ’ confessed Gardas. ‘ _So I had to rip my arm, and..._ ’

‘Let’s deal with you first,’ said Willow. She led Gardas to a cupboard where medical supplies were kept, poured from a bottle of what Gardas recognised by the smell to be dragon-wort infusion into a bowl, bathed Gardas’s wound and wrapped it firmly in bandages. ‘Did you have a reason for attacking yourself, or were you just punishing yourself?’ she asked.

‘ _I was trying to heal Katracstrasza,_ ’ Gardas explained. ‘ _My blood has healing powers when I’m in full dragon form, but I don’t think it worked…_ ’

He was interrupted by the excited cries of three dragonets in flight. ‘ _Na-na-ner-na-na, you can’t catch me!_ ’

‘ _Can so! Tag, you’re it!_ ’

‘ _Tag! Now Kat’s it!_ ’

‘ _Maybe it did work,_ ’ Gardas admitted. Katracstrasza, realising that the adults had noticed her, abandoned the game and flew unevenly to Gardas, landing on his shoulder. ‘ _My wing still hurts,_ ’ she announced. ‘ _And Gemma’s throw-up is still stinky._ ’

Willow examined her, ignoring her whimpers of protest. ‘Her wing-membrane’s torn, all right,’ she said. ‘But at least the bones aren’t broken. I don’t think they ever were – she’s always this melodramatic when she’s hurt. Come on, missy, we’ll need to clean that wound and stitch it.’

‘ _What’s she saying?_ ’ Katracstrasza asked.

‘ _She needs to wash your hurt wing, and then she’s going to sew it up, so that it heals properly,_ ’ explained Gardas.

‘ _Ow! No way!_ ’ Katracstrasza took off, flapping her wings desperately, but the injured wing wasn’t strong enough to keep pace with the other one, and she soon fell. Gardas caught her just in time, and held her still while Willow poured out another bowlful of dragon-wort lotion. The herb had nothing to do with real dragons, and wasn’t as strongly magical as most people believed, but it was a useful antiseptic.

‘ _Have you got any painkillers?_ ’ Gardas asked, as Willow found a sharp needle and thread, and washed the needle in more dragon-wort infusion.

Willow checked. ‘We’ve run out,’ she said. ‘They’re always hurting themselves. Put the muzzle on her so she can’t chew at her stitches.’ For other beasts, it would have been a cone of sticks and canvas to prevent them from being able to reach their stitches, but that wasn’t much good for a dragon who could simply burn the cone off. At least the muzzle, which was a sort of cage of metal wire, left Katracstrasza enough space to be able to open her mouth, speak, and even eat if small enough morsels were fed to her through the gaps. It stopped her chewing her stitches, and also stopped her from being able to bite either Gardas as he held her still, or Willow as she stitched the wound without anaesthetic, and then wrapped the whole wing in bandages. Instead, the dragonet just whimpered piteously. Gardas felt desperately sorry for her. If they couldn’t relieve the pain, at the very least she should have been allowed to bite down on something – and if that something happened to be him, it was no more than he deserved.

Willow finished bandaging at last. Katracstrasza tried to fly off, and almost fell before Gardas caught her.

‘ _You can’t fly until you’re better,_ ’ he said.

‘We’ll have to keep her locked up, until she’s better,’ said Willow. ‘Otherwise she’ll try to fly, or the others will tease her and keep trying to pull her bandages off. Gail lent me a chicken coop, made of wire netting…’

‘ _No!_ ’ said Gardas indignantly. ‘ _She’s a person, not a chicken! Would your mother put her in a cage?_ ’

‘She used to carry them around with her, when they were hurt,’ said Willow. ‘But she can’t do that now.’

‘ _I can._ ’ Gardas couldn’t think of any logical reason why Katracstrasza would trust him, the person who had just injured her, but she seemed quite content to snuggle against him. ‘ _I’ll sit up with her tonight. I wasn’t sleeping much anyway._ ’

‘All right. I’ll clear up the mess,’ said Willow.

‘ _Thank you,_ ’ said Gardas. ‘ _And – I’m sorry about everything._ ’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Willow, so wearily that Gardas couldn’t tell whether she meant that she didn’t mind the trouble he had caused, or that his apology didn’t make things any better.

‘ _It does matter,_ ’ Gardas said. ‘ _I’ve hurt one of your dragons, and you’ve got every right to be angry with me._ ’

‘No-one has any rights – only privileges,’ said Willow flatly. ‘And anger is a sin. I’ll clear up, and then I’m going back to bed. Goodnight.’


	10. Chapter 10

Perdita had gone to bed when Dad told her, and drowsed off after he’d told her a bedtime story, even though he wasn’t as good at telling stories as Mum. Gardas told her stories too, sometimes, from plays he’d been in, but he wasn’t good at making things up. He liked reading aloud from books, or saying the speeches he’d learnt by heart, or repeating stories Mum had told him. Mum had started teaching Perdita to read a little, so that she would already know her letters when she started school in the autumn, after Harvest. Perdita had tried reading Gardas’s How To Train Your Demon books, but they didn’t have pictures like the Herbal and the Bestiary, and the writing went all funny after a while, as if all the letters had dried up and shrunk, like when the fat round currants you picked off a bush turned into the wrinkled dried currants that went into cakes. Also, the books smelled yucky, like blood.

By the time Dad had finished telling her a story, Perdita was asleep, clutching her soft toy dragon, Ragnar. Gardas had made her when Perdita was a baby, because Perdita’s other toy dragon, Terry Cotta, was made of clay and could get broken if she dropped him.

She woke up in the middle of the night. She could hear Mum and Dad talking, so Gardas must be home as well. Ragnar had fallen out of bed, and Perdita couldn’t see where the cuddly dragon was, because the candle on the cupboard by Perdita’s bed had gone out. She wondered whether to call Mum or Gardas and ask them to come in and help her find Ragnar so that she could get back to sleep. She decided she didn’t really need to. She was a big girl now, and she was going to school after Harvest, and she didn’t need a grown-up to help her find a lost toy. After all, it wasn’t all that dark in here. The shutters were open – only a crack, because Dad had thought it might rain, but she could see a little moonlight and starlight through them. She could probably see as well by moonlight as a human could with a candle. Anyway, Mum and Dad didn’t even know that she never slept much when it was close to full moon, and if she didn’t call them, they didn’t need to know. But she should probably stay quiet until the grown-ups had gone to sleep before she climbed out of bed, so as not to disturb them.

Gardas would probably hear her, though. Even when he was in human form, he had sharper hearing than the other humans, and he never slept very deeply, unless he’d had a calming potion. Perdita didn’t think he’d had one tonight, because they always made him snore. She couldn’t hear him anywhere. Was he in Mum and Dad’s bedroom? They were talking about Gardas, but Perdita didn’t think they were actually talking to him. She heard Mum say, ‘I’ve told Paul that Gardas might be in Wyrms. After all, he COULD go there,’ and Dad say, ‘What? This is Beatrice speaking? You NEVER lie! Especially to children.’

So Gardas wasn’t in Wyrms – but he hadn’t come home, either. Mum and Dad seemed to think he might be with Willow, the lady who’d come to visit them. Willow was Mrs Thra’s daughter, so she lived in Woadhill. Perdita didn’t know her way around Woadhill the town very well, but she and Gardas had sometimes flown to Woad Hill itself, and landed next to the old ruined temple on the top of the hill.

Perdita remembered the first ever time she’d turned into a dragon. It was a very long time ago, when she was only three. As a big girl of five, she didn’t remember quite why the things she’d done when she was three had seemed a good idea, but she remembered that she’d flown away, and she’d met Maz, also in dragon form, in the forest. And she knew she’d be safe with Maz, because Maz was practically grown up, even if she was a tiny Gules dragon the size of a fox. She hadn’t even thought that Paul and Gardas might be worried. But they had been, and they had flown off to look for her.

Now Gardas had flown off, and Mum and Dad sounded worried about him, even though he really was a grown-up – not just sort-of grown-up like Paul and Maz, but properly grown-up like Mum and Dad. Except that – he wasn’t, because half of him was Shadow, and Shadow was like a baby dragon, like the dragonet that Perdita had been when she was three, except that he was grown-up-dragon-sized. Sometimes Gardas forgot how to stop being Shadow and go back to being grown-up Gardas. So – Gardas was Perdita’s adopted big brother, even though he was the same age as Mum, but when he was Shadow, did that mean he was Perdita’s little brother, and she needed to look after him? She thought it probably did.

Perdita waited until she was sure Mum and Dad were asleep. Then she climbed out of bed. It was very dark, but Perdita couldn’t reach to push the shutter further open. If she was in dragon form, she could do that, but she was getting to be quite big in dragon form, so maybe she wouldn’t fit in her bedroom if she changed indoors. Maybe she needed to be just dragonish enough to be tall enough to reach the shutters? No – she had a better idea. She made herself just dragonish enough, just for a moment, to short at the candle and light it. That was better. By candlelight, she found Ragnar and settled her back on the bed. Next, still clutching the candle, Perdita eased open her bedroom door and stepped out onto the landing, listened at Gardas’s door, and then opened it, too, just in case Gardas was there after all. 

The room was empty. Perdita hadn’t really thought Gardas would be there. When he hadn’t had a calming potion and wasn’t snoring, he talked in his sleep instead. And if he’d been awake, he’d probably have wanted to look in on Perdita to make sure she was all right.

Perdita wasn’t sure how long it would take to look for Gardas. She thought she’d better take Ragnar with her, and maybe some games to play in case she got bored. Gardas had made her a satchel for when she started school, so that she could carry a slate to practise writing on, and anything else she needed. At the moment, she mostly used it to carry Ragnar and interesting things she’d found, like pretty leaves or snail-shells. She couldn’t fit the satchel across her shoulder when she was a dragon, of course, but she could always hold the strap in her teeth. It wouldn’t weigh much, for a Grey dragon.

Come to think of it, even when she’d found Gardas, she didn’t know how long it would be before they could get home. When they’d been to Wyrms, they’d been there for ages, because they got hurt and couldn’t fly. So she probably ought to bring something for Gardas as well. He couldn’t get to sleep without his books, the same way Perdita couldn’t get to sleep without Ragnar. She wasn’t sure which one he was reading at the moment, so she put all five of them in the satchel. 

After that, there wasn’t room for any of Perdita’s toys except Ragnar, but the soft stuffed dragon squished into the end without complaining too much. She looked sadly at her friend Terry Cotta, still sitting on the top of the cupboard. ‘We can’t take Terry Cotta, because he could get hurt,’ Perdita explained in a whisper. ‘But you can tell him all about it when we get back.’ Ragnar, whose long neck and head were drooping out of the satchel, nodded sadly.

Perdita lifted up her satchel – which might not be heavy for a Grey dragon, but was VERY heavy for a little girl, or even a big girl – and crept downstairs to the front door. She opened the latch, stepped outside, carefully took off her nightdress to make sure it didn’t get ripped, and changed. She gripped the strap of her satchel firmly in her teeth, spread her wings, and rose into the sky.


	11. Chapter 11

Gardas sat with his hind legs stretched out in front of him and his tail behind him, like Perdita’s dolls. It wasn’t a comfortable position, but that was the point. He needed to be uncomfortable enough to make sure that he didn’t fall asleep again, and lash out at poor little Katracstrasza because of another bad dream.

He cradled the dragonet in his forepaws, trying to support her injured wing without putting pressure on it. To Gardas’s surprise, she had drifted off to sleep quite happily, and Elistrasza and Gemastrasza were curled around his paws. It was as if, even after they’d seen him hurt a child, they couldn’t recognise him for the monster he was.

He had become too complacent, that was the trouble. In the course of the last few years, he had made so many good friends, whether humans, dragons, were-dragons or other, that when he was flying with Maz and Martin and Perdita, or play-fighting with Obashu, or rehearsing a play with George and the other humans, he could almost allow himself to forget that he was a monster. But he should have known it would be fatal to forget altogether.

Beatrice said she didn’t see him as a monster. Even Paul didn’t see him as one, these days. But he certainly had done when he was thirteen, back when he had known Gardas only as the scary dragon who had burnt his arm, rather than as his embarrassingly eccentric dad.

When they’d played _Saving Father Yule_ , George could have cast Gardas as the villain, a deranged assassin whose hobby since childhood had been working out ways to kill gods and other supernatural entities. Or at least Gardas could have played the villain’s sidekick, the big dim thug who is eventually redeemed when he refuses to kill the heroine. Instead, George had cast him as Death (since this was one of the stories where Death is the hero rather than the villain) – but he had told the actors playing the bad guys to listen when Gardas explained to them what being a villain feels like.

In the play, Death had to stand in for Father Yule, and met many children, who weren’t afraid of him because they can see that he wasn’t really a monster just because he was a talking, scythe-wielding skeleton. Children, the play said, are wise enough to see that human villains like the assassin are the real monsters.

So – if thirteen-year-old Paul had regarded Gardas as a monster, and eighteen-year-old Paul no longer did, it just proved that adults weren’t as wise as children and Paul had been right the first time. Of course, Perdita¸ and the little Gules dragonets here, didn’t seem to see Gardas as a monster either. But then, they were too young to know any better.

Gardas was vaguely aware that this didn’t make sense, but he was too tired to care. He just WAS a monster, and that was all there was to it. Beatrice said he wasn’t, but Beatrice also said he needed to think for himself and not let other people decide what he was. So he could start by deciding that Beatrice was wrong and he was a monster.

Gardas knew that if Xanthus was there, he’d say, ‘Gardas, you’ve been doing well. This is just a relapse, because you’re tired and anxious and away from home and feeling guilty. It doesn’t mean you’re not getting better overall.’ Except that Xanthus had been content to turn Willow away, and even turn old Mrs Thra away for trying to get help for her daughter, so probably now he’d reject Gardas as well for feeling worried about them.

Sometimes worrying about people and trying to help them could be what set you on the path to villainy. Gardas had seen that in the stories he’d heard and the plays he’d been in, too. Like the wizard he’d played in last year’s Maidensday play, who had been so desperate to protect the woman he loved that he had tried to appease the Dark Lord by bringing a prophecy to him in exchange for his beloved’s life, and the Dark Lord had responded to the prophecy by murdering the woman and her husband.

Gardas had tried to work out how the rules worked for people like him. A monster couldn’t be the hero, but maybe didn’t have to be the villain either – he could be the Dark Lord’s henchman who eventually rebels against his evil master and kills him to save the hero, but is mortally wounded and dies soon afterwards, preferably in the hero’s arms. (Except that Gardas had already failed to get himself killed in killing Azalar.) He recited to himself a set of notes which he had put together on how to be a reasonably decent monster, which he thought of as the Monster’s Code:

  1. _There are always two: an Evil Master and a Less Evil Master. The Evil Master will offer you what you most want or need. DO NOT TRUST HIM, even if he seems like your only hope for saving the life of the woman you love. You will probably need to kill him._
  2. _The Less Evil Master isn’t perfect or always right, but he’s the nearest you’ll get to a decent mentor and father. Be loyal to him, even if he hurts you. DO NOT KILL HIM, unless he specifically requests this when he is already mortally wounded and needs you to kill him in order to trick the Evil Master into believing you are still on the Evil Master’s side._
  3. _There is always the Lady. DO NOT FALL IN LOVE WITH HER – it will probably result in both her death and your own. Stick to being her loyal bodyguard – you’re allowed to do that._
  4. _There is always the Boy, the son of the Lady. Guard him with your life, until he is grown to be a man. After that, you can let yourself get killed._



He hadn’t intended to speak out loud, but perhaps his voice had disturbed Willow. Upstairs, he could hear voices. The first was the mean little ivory dragon he had heard earlier: ‘ _Well, Willow, say your creed!_ ’ And then Willow’s voice, wearily reciting something by rote as if she had done so thousands of times before: ‘ _There is no love; there is only hate. There is no joy; there is only weeping. There is no peace; there is only the sword. There is no mercy; there is only justice. No-one is good except Ixtpritzt_.’

Gardas jolted awake, startled by Katracstrasza nipping his foreclaw. He must have nodded off and been dreaming again, he realised in horror – and he could easily have hurt the little dragonet once more. ‘ _Are you all right?_ ’ he asked, alarmed.

‘ _No!_ ’ wailed the little dragon. ‘ _Hurting! Can’t sleep!_ ’

‘ _Is your wing hurting? I’m sorry, little one. We’ll be able to get some herbs in the morning to make some more painkilling potion._ ’

‘ _No, not my wing! My tummy hurts! Rub it better!_ ’

Oh, of course. Gardas wondered why he hadn’t thought of something so obvious. He didn’t have as much experience with dragon hatchlings as with human babies – Perdita hadn’t taken dragon form until she was three, and Aurelia, the baby Sovereign of Wyrms, was a Gold and lived on sunlight, which meant she didn’t have to worry about digestion. But, just as human babies needed to be burped, presumably so did Gules dragonets. If he was human and Katracstrasza was human, he could rub or pat her back with his hand, but how would that work when her back was protected by armoured spikes, and he had talons instead of fleshy hands? Besides, there was always the risk of jarring her injured wing and making it worse. Practically everything on dragons was armoured, apart from the wing membranes. Dragons might not have the bony ribcage of other animals, but their hard body-scales were usually enough to protect them. Even their tongues were armoured.

Inspiration struck. Gardas craned his head forward and flipped his long, forked tongue over Katracstrasza’s flanks. It rattled slightly against her hard scales. She giggled, and tapped Gardas’s forepaw with her own dart-shaped tongue, mirroring the dart on the tip of her tale. Gardas flipped her over and began licking her tummy.

Dragons’ tongues varied as much as every other part of them. Blue dragons, like Gardas’s friend Obashu, had long, pointed, dark mauve tongues. Green dragons, like Obashu’s wife Clover, were covered in a fluffy down that seemed halfway between fur and feathers, and had tongues as rough as a teasel-head, for preening. Perdita’s tongue, even in dragon form, was as soft and pink as a mammal’s – but then, Grey dragons’ fire wasn’t normally hot enough for their mouths to need protection.

Katracstrasza murmured with relief as the massage from Gardas’s tongue relaxed her. He remembered that human babies sometimes threw up on him when burped. He hoped Katracstrasza was either too young to be able to breathe fire, or had enough self-control not to set fire to the house – though his scales would probably be enough to protect him from injury…

Instead, Katracstrasza relaxed her body and squirted a stream of guano all over him. He started, waking the other two dragonets.

‘ _Ugh, stinky!_ ’ complained Gemastrasza.

‘ _Naughty Katracstrasza!_ ’ said Elistrasza. ‘ _Poo in the kacky-patch! Not inside!_ ’

‘ _Can’t fly!_ ’ pointed out Katracstrasza.

Gardas realised that he couldn’t see anything like an earth tray for the dragonets to relieve themselves on. Why hadn’t he wondered about that earlier? But – ah, yes – there was a dragon-flap in the back door, just the right size that dragons could fly out into the garden when they needed to. 

Even though different kinds of dragon had different powers, so that Black dragons like Gardas had healing blood and poisonous fire but Greys like Perdita had healing fire and poisonous tears, at least dragon guano was safely neutral. It was a good fertilising agent and didn’t poison anything, and, as Gardas and Maz and Martin kept switching between human and dragon form too often to let many human-parasites or dragon-parasites build up in their systems, they didn’t have to worry about spreading disease if they sprayed guano as they flew. Equally, it didn’t have any notable magical powers, so they didn’t have to worry that they ought to be collecting it in order to use it in spells. Not having to worry about finding a privy was one of the most liberating things about being a dragon.

Come to think of it, he had only ever defecated while he flew. Something about the motion of flying relaxed his innards. So that would be what Katracstrasza normally did – but now, until she recovered, she would need Gardas to massage her, and she hadn’t thought to explain that he ought to be holding her outside while he did this.

Oh, well. He prowled around until he found a bucket that looked as if it was generally used for cleaning, some rags, and a jar of water. He poured a little water into the bucket, and began cleaning himself up. ‘ _Next time, tell me when you need to go outside,_ ’ he reminded Katracstrasza firmly. ‘ _All right?_ ’

‘ _Hungry!_ ’ said Katracstrasza. ‘ _Want kingfisher!_ ’

‘ _Want butterfly!_ ’ put in Elistrasza.

‘ _We can open the other pigeon,_ ’ said Gardas. ‘ _Gemastrasza, do you want anything?_ ’ Gemastrasza turned away as if the idea of food revolted her. Gardas divided a pigeon between Katracstrasza and Elistrasza, and settled them all back to sleep. He had almost nodded off himself when he was awakened, this time not by a nip on the talon, but by a knocking on the front door. ‘Dad? Dad, are you in there?’


End file.
